Suzanne. Un livre à inventer: la lecteur sujet du livre.

by BERNARD

£2,500 · Offered by Henry Sotheran Ltd

The First French Woman to Publish Concrete Poetry BERNARD, Suzanne. Un livre à inventer: la lecteur sujet du livre. Paris: Art Socio-Expérimental. [1962]. 8vo. Original brown printed wrappers; pp. [247], [1 (blank)]; spine creased, slight wear to corners with creasing to lower corner of front cover and first 12 pp. of text, two small red ink-marks to fore-edge of textblock; internally clean and bright; a very good copy. First and only edition, extremely rare, of the first concrete poetry book to be published by a French woman, self-published by Bernard at her centre for socio-experimental art. Despite the known importance of French poet-artists from the first half of twentieth century, the later decades – prior to the shift of the artistic centre to New York – remains comparatively overlooked. One of the major movements was Lettrism, founded in 1946 by Isidore Isou. The present work, in which Bernard pushes the boundaries of the book, language, and art, exemplifies the movement’s guiding principle of reducing language to its fundamental components. Even when the Lettrists are remembered, however, the women are often completely forgotten. Suzanne Bernard is one such figure who remains almost entirely unknown to this day. She was an experimental poet, and the first French woman to engage with concrete poetry. For most of her career, she was a scholar who specialised in the French Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé. In 1959 she published a monumental study of the prose poem, Le Po

• Binding: Hardcover

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