Soulèvement de la Jeunesse - Youth Uprising

About

Soulèvement de la Jeunesse, or Youth Uprising, published in 1949, was the first book on the favourite subject of Isidore Isou, the founder of Lettrist movement. The discovery of youth as a revolutionary force remained a leitmotif for the poet, pointier, and thinker over the course of his lifetime. During the 1950s, the Lettrists published a newspaper with the same name and created countless pictures, books, manifestos, and texts opposing French policy in Algeria and Vietnam as well as domestic cultural and social policies. Ultimately, Lettrism and other movements led to the Paris events of May 1968, which echoed across Europe.

Arno and Elke Morenz began their collection in 1968 as a result of their personal friendship with members of Lettrism in Paris and have over 50 years collected numerous art works (pictures, sculpture, photography, film) and books, tracts, and manifestos.

Already in 1952, several Lettrists  (Guy Debord, Gil J. Wolman, Jean Louis Brau) broke with Isou and formed, with several very productive detours with Asger Jorn, the Situationist Internation in 1957. The EAM Collection is naturally also interested in these new groups as well. The collection brings together important historical works and documents from Lettrisme and the Situationist International that are extremely rare today.