Maurice Lemaître

Maurice Lemaître, born in Paris on April 23, 1926, is a French artist, writer and poet. He is one of the figures of lettrism from the 1950s to today. Maurice Lemaître, prepares the School of Arts and Crafts and that of Public Works. After participating in the Liberation of Paris, he began a degree in philosophy at the Sorbonne. Joining the libertarian movement in 1948, he began a career as a journalist by writing in the movement's newspaper. In 1949, he met Isidore Isou there and was seduced by his political ideas and creative enthusiasm. A year later, he joined the Lettrist avant-garde group, where he created, the same year, a political review: the “Youth Front”, as well as a literary and pictorial review, “Ur”, which remains like “The Minotaur” of Lettrism. Since that date, Maurice Lemaître has continued to act and create in various fields explored by the Lettrist movement: poetry, theater, dance, novels, painting, photography, cinema, economics, psychopathology and psychotherapy.
The contributions of Maurice Lemaître in the visual arts, in poetry and in the novel are so essential that he is cited in modern studies on contemporary literature (Centre Pompidou, Hachette, Seghers, Larousse...), as well as in the Western and Eastern countries. Poems by Maurice Lemaître were set to music by the lutenist-theorbist Michel Faleze and sung by Marie-Thérèse Richol-Müller.