Monique Boucher — L’air pauvre — Exhibition / Literary Event Invitation, Les Aliscans Librairie, Paris, 1971

Exhibition / literary event invitation card
Librairie Les Aliscans, 57 rue de Rennes, Paris
10 × 21 cm
Offset print on thin card stock, black ink on cream paper
Friday 19 November 1971, 18h–21h

Rare surviving invitation issued for a November 1971 event at Librairie Les Aliscans, Paris, announcing L’air pauvre, with texts by Monique Boucher and imagery credited to Abdallah Benanteur. The typography and compressed graphic layout place the piece somewhere between poetry announcement, small-press avant-garde printing, and Left Bank countercultural ephemera.

The object carries a distinctly early-1970s Paris literary-art atmosphere: independent bookstore infrastructure, experimental publishing culture, and artist-designed printed matter produced outside larger institutional systems. The stark black graphic band and warped typography give the card a proto-conceptual, near concrete-poetry sensibility, closer to artist publication culture than a conventional invitation.

Abdallah Benanteur’s involvement adds another layer of interest. The Algerian-born painter and printmaker moved within overlapping literary and artistic circles in Paris during this period, often collaborating with poets and small presses. Here the invitation functions less as advertisement than as a compact printed event-object.

Condition: Fair to good vintage condition. Visible creasing and handling wear to lower corners; age toning and light surface marks consistent with fragile early-1970s paper ephemera. The wear remains part of the object’s circulation history.

Shipping and handling included.