Christian Boltanski & Jean-Claude Lebensztejn
Les Mots à secrets

A major, internationally renowned French visual artist, Christian Boltanski (1944–2021) questions memory, forgetting, and erasure in his conceptual installations.

Titled “Les Mots à secrets” [Secret Words], this publication brings together a series of nineteen original drawings by the artist alongside Jean-Claude Lebensztejn’s text “Une rêverie émanée de mes loisirs”.

The work consists of nineteen individual folders, each containing a page of text overlaid with a five-color drawing on tracing paper. These drawings spell out coded phrases, the solutions to which are provided upside-down at the end of the book. Page 1 presents the first five words of five distinct phrases, a structural pattern that unfolds across the remaining folders. 

The text is hand-set by the typographers of the Atelier du Livre in Didot millimétrique type and printed on the Imprimerie Nationale presses on 250 gsm Vélin Rives paper. 

The entire publication is housed in a slipcase wrapped in school-notebook blue paper, featuring a label handwritten by the artist.

Book III.
Published in 1993
34.8 x 26.3 x 3 cm (case)
Limited edition of 150 copies, including 108 copies for sale, signed and numbered by the artist and the author

© Yvon Lambert Editions