Lettrisme, or Lettrism
Kaldron Lettriste Pages - A site with links to all things Lettrisme, or Lettrism, the French Avant-Garde Film and Visual Poetry movement often associated with the French Revolutionary Student Movement of 1968, but influencing other forms of art and poetry in Europe and Latin America up to the present.
From the Wikipedia article on Lettrism:
Lettrism (also referred to as Letterism) was an artistic style pursuing the hyper-minimalist refinement of art to its simplest and purest form. According to Jean-Paul Curtay in La Poesie Lettriste (Paris 1974), it was created in 1942 in Romania by Isidore Isou, when he was only sixteen years old. Lettrism was a response to what the Lettrists saw as Andr� Breton’s control of Surrealism, as well as an attempt to make poetry more popular. The Lettrists worked in a variety of forms including sound as well as graphic arts involving letters. Isou noted that Dadaism had chiseled art down to the word, while Lettrism was intended to refine it to the letter (hence its name). While Dada took art to a simple and implausible form, Lettrism aimed to refine it even more to its initial form. The stark simplicity of Lettrist art, while still very much abstract, stood in contrast to the sometimes meandering Surrealist movement; but both shared their roots in Dada.
