Altmann was born in Havana in 1942. His father was a collector, editor and banker of Jewish origins who fled his birth country Germany and settled in Cuba in 1941. Roberto Altmann spent his childhood among the Cuban art circles, before the family moved to New York and then Vaduz in Liechtenstein.


In 1962 he exhibited his paintings in Paris, where he came in touch with the Romanian-born poet and author Isidore Isou, who had founded the avant-gardistic Lettrism movement in France shortly after World War II. Lettrists were dedicated to establish a new surreal norm for all forms of art. The basic thought was that common narrative prose and pictorial expressions had worn out, and it was time for a new aestheti...