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Isidore Isou (born as Ioan-Isidor Goldstein, 1928, in Botoşani, Romania) is a poet, film critic, visual artist and founder of Lettrisme.
He moved to Paris at the end of World War II, having developed many concepts that intended as a total artistic renewing starting from their lower levels. He called himself a "Lettriste," a movement of which he was initially the only member (at the age of 16 he had published the Manifesto in 1942) and published a system of Lettrist hypergraphics. Others soon joined him, and the movement continues to grow, albeit at times under a confusing number of different names.
In the 1960s Lettriste, Lettriste-influenced works and Isodore Isou gained a great deal of respect in France. Guy Debord and Gil Wolman worked with Isou for a while, before breaking away to form the Lettrist International, which latter merged with the International movement for an imaginist Bauhaus, and the London Psychogeographical Association to form the Situationist International, a dissident communist group. This is how lettrist art influenced the posters, barricades, even clothing in the attempted revolution of 1968. Although it seemed a highly self-contained art in the post-war period, in 1968 it suddenly became more deeply involved in active social change than such movements as Existentialism and Surrealism, and came closer to producing actual transformation than these movements.
At present, Isou himself, in poor health, continues to work with great determination in his studio - looking back, but not at a particular moment, and not in such a way as to slow himself down.
Quote
Je prefere mon nouveau dégout à l'ancien gout dégoutant. ("I'd rather have my new distaste than the old distasteful taste.")
Published works
- Les Champs de Force de la Peinture Lettriste (Paris: Avant- Garde, 1964).
- MANIFESTO OF LETTERIST POETRY: A Commonplaces about Words,
- Introduction à une Nouvelle Poésie et une Nouvelle Musique. Paris: Gallimard, 1947.
- LES JOURNAUX DES DIEUX, 1950/51
External links
1928 births | French poets | Living people | Romanian-French people | Romanian poets | Romanian writers in French | Situationism
"Isidore Isou"