Sunday, March 17, 2024, 6.30pm to 8.00pm UK time (Please check your own time zone).

Please join us for a conversation (in English) with Jean-Jacques Lebel led by Christina Heflin and Abigail Susik with a focus on Lebel’s late 1950s/early 1960s publication, Front Unique.

Register for the event here.

Jean-Jacques has generously agreed to share scans of two volumes of Front Unique, which can be found on the event registration page here, for a limited time to all in order to facilitate a rich and dynamic discussion with attendees. These two issues include texts by Jean-Jacques Lebel, André Breton, Tristan Sauvage, Francis Picabia, Benjamin Péret, Henri Kréa, Gérard Legrand, José Pierre, Robert Benayoun, Jen-Louis Bédouin, Jacques Lacomblez, Jean-Claude Silbermann, Alain Joubert, Kostas Axelos, and Edouard Jaguer. Illustrations by Jean Arp, Victor Brauner, Sebastian Matta, Yves Tanguy, Max Walter Svanberg, Jean Benoit, etc.

Jean-Jacques Lebel (b. June 30, 1936, Paris) is a French visual artist, poet, art collector, writer, political activist, and creator of performance art happening art events. Besides his heterogeneous artworks and poetry, Lebel is also known for his very early work with the Beat Generation and Happenings (organizer of the first Happening in Europe), and as an art theory writer with close ties to Félix Guattari, Gilles Deleuze and the American poetry and art scene. He is also an art curator and son of Robert Lebel, a poet, translator, poetry publisher, political activist, art collector, art historian and expert in the work of Marcel Duchamp.

Christina Heflin is an art historian who will begin her fellowship later this year at the Bibliotheca Hertziana, Rome and the Deutsches Forum für Kunstgeschichte, Paris to work on Arturo Schwarz and his connection with Surrealism in Italy. She is currently a postdoctoral teaching and research fellow at Paris 1 – Panthéon-Sorbonne and completed her doctoral work at Royal Holloway University of London on Surrealism, materialist science and marine life. Co-coordinator of the virtual events series for the International Society for the Study of Surrealism, her recent publications include the chapter ‘Surrealism in England’ in The Routledge Companion to Surrealism and an upcoming chapter in the Vernon Press volume, Surrealism and Ecology. A monographic adaptation of her thesis, Submerged Surrealism: Marine Fauna in the Service of Subversion, is currently underway.

Abigail Susik is joint editor of the Bloomsbury Transnational Surrealism Book Series and author of Surrealist Sabotage and the War on Work (Manchester UP, 2021). She is coeditor of Surrealism and Film after 1945: Absolutely Modern Mysteries (Manchester UP, 2021) and Radical Dreams: Surrealism, Counterculture, Resistance (Penn State UP, 2022). With legendary radical Paul Buhle, she coedited the forthcoming anthology of writings by Franklin Rosemont, Bugs Bunny and the Blues: Selected Writings on Surrealism and Popular Culture, 1965–2008 (PM Press, 2024). Her edited collection The Surrealist Art of Animation: 1920-present​ is forthcoming from Bloomsbury in May 2025.