A public lecture on the history of the American reception and impact of one of the most radical Parisian late avant-gardes: the Lettrist movement.
Lettrism was the creative offspring of Dadaist destruction, led by the avant-garde “madman” from Romania, Isidore Isou. Rising in the post-war wasp’s nest of the cult quarter Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Isou’s movement soon became one of the most extreme motors of the Parisian literary scene. Centered at its inauguration on the decomposition of words into letters, and grounded in the totalizing philosophy of the Enlightenment; Lettrism aimed at transforming all aspects of culture – and life itself. Exhibiting an all-encompassing “dropout modernism”, Lettrism brought with its eruptive start innumerable contributions to poetry, fine art, cinema, theater, social theory, psychology, and epistemology.
The official poster for the exhibition: Letterism and Hypergraphics: The Unknown Avant-Garde 1945–1985, held at Franklin Furnace between October 4 and December 7, 1985.
The LOFT lecture focuses on Lettrism’s journey overseas, with special regard to the retrospective exhibition held at Franklin Furnace: Letterism and Hypergraphics: The Unknown Avant-Garde 1945–1985, presented between October 4 and December 7, 1985. The exhibition became a key reference point in the Anglo-Saxon reception of Lettrism, and its catalogue (which was just translated into Hungarian on the occasion of Franklin Furnace’s 50th Anniversary Edition program series) was among the most popular early English introductions to the movement.
The story of the exhibition is rooted in the American study years (from 1980 onward) of the curator of the ’85 event: the young Lettrist painter and performer (and medical student at the time) Jean-Paul Curtay (b. 1951). During this period, Curtay organized several exhibitions and delivered lecture-performances on Lettrism at leading U.S. universities. He joined the Lettrist movement in 1967 at the age of sixteen, edited four issues of Le Soulèvement de la Jeunesse, authored the first monograph on Lettrist poetry (La poésie lettriste, Paris, Seghers, 1974), and played a key role in establishing Lettrism’s reception in both Italy and the United States. His artistic innovations include body music, hypergraphic music, imaginary music, and hypergraphic video.
Gérard Philippe Broutin: Les habitants de New-York, 7 am : lento ma non troppo (art corporel), 1980, gravure sur Arches, ca cm 30 x 20 numérotée de I à XX.
Click the image above to read the full article: “Isidore Isou és az ismeretlen avantgárd.” Hungarian translation by Mihály G. Horváth of Jean-Paul Curtay’s Letterism and Hypergraphics: The Unknown Avant-Garde 1945–1985.
Video documentation of the 6:00pm ET, January 27, 2026event of Lettrism in America – An Avant-Garde’s Journey Overseas. Recorded on Zoom, edited by Xinan Ran.
About the presenter: 
Mihály G. Horváth is Budapest-based scholar and experimental filmmaker. He is the founding curator of Celluloidra Revolverrel and a visiting lecturer at the Film Studies Department of the Institute of Art Theory and Media Studies, Faculty of Humanities, Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE). His research focuses on the postwar French late avant-garde, with particular emphasis on the Lettrist Movement and the Situationist International.
Outside his research on the philosophy and history of the Parisian late-avant-garde, he experiments with moving-image based mixed media works and making noise. He is currently enrolled in the Media Design Programme of the Moholy-Nagy University of Arts and Design.
