Poet-Artists of the French Avant-Garde: 1946 - 79

curated by Frédéric Acquaviva

Altagor, Roberto Altmann, Suzanne Bernard, Jean-Francois Bory, Jean-Louis Brau, Cozette de Charmoy, Henri Chopin, Guy Debord, François Dufrêne, Robert Filliou, Pierre & Ilse Garnier, Paul-Armand Gette, Bernard Heidsieck, Joël Hubaut, Isidore Isou, Aude Jessemin, Maurice Lemaître, Maggy Mauritz, Jean-Luc Parant, Gabriel Pomerand, Jacques Spacagna, Ben Vautier, Gil J Wolman

opening Thursday 6th November 2025

at Sotheran’s Athenaeum, 22 Charing Cross Road, London, WC2H 0HS

VIEW THE CATALOGUE HERE

CASSIUS&Co. in partnership with Sotheran’s presents Poet-Artists of the French Avant-Garde: 1946 - 79, curated by Frédéric Acquaviva, the second exhibition presented by CASSIUS&Co. at Sotheran’s Athenaeum. This ambitious presentation, which includes paintings, drawings, sculptures, print-portfolios, records and books by twenty-four artists, is the most comprehensive survey of this particular strain of the French avant-garde ever undertaken in the United Kingdom.

With roots in the Dada of Tristan Tzara, the conception of a concerted effort to deconstruct the visual and linguistic codes of the past can be attributed to Isidore Isou and his theories of Lettrism in the 1940s. This exhibition charts this conception, and follows it through its successive iterations, from Fluxus and Guy Debord’s International Situationists to Concrete, Metapoetry and Hypergraphy, as well as the independent artists of the second half of the last century who rearranged Isou’s methods. What brings these groups together is their ambition, through poetry, images, film and protest movements, to dismantle the structures of the culture of the past in order to make way for what they believed to be the first fundamentally new mode of art-making since the age of Homer and Pheidias.

Timed to coincide with Isidore Isou’s centenary, the exhibition includes the foundational texts of the Lettrist group alongside language-based paintings by its leading proponents, typewriter drawings by Henri Chopin and Jean-Francois Bory, an early blackboard work by Ben Vautier, perhaps the only work of visual art by Guy Debord remaining in private hands, Concrete works by Ilse Garnier and Suzanne Bernard, and books and other printed materials so rare that many will have considered them irretrievable.

A fully-illustrated catalogue with an introduction by curator Frédéric Acquaviva will be published alongside the exhibition, and all the works included will be available for sale. Poet-Artists of the French Avant-Garde: 1946 - 79 precedes Isidore Isou and the Lettrist Book, which will take place at the Center for Book Arts, New York, in 2026. Please email fb@cassiusandco.com if you would like to receive a digital preview and/ or a printed copy of the present exhibition’s catalogue.