The 18th-century French Revolution may best be remembered for the use of the guillotine to chop off the heads of monarchs, but the ideological repercussions of overthrowing the government extended beyond the political sphere. The intellectual current of the Enlightenment leading to the revolution not only sparked the 1789 coup d’état, but also impacted literature, visual arts and architecture. Enraptured by a spirit of change, the architect Jean-Jacques Lequeu was inspired to draft hundreds of radical and strange buildings — none of which were constructed — that would reflect both the building’s function and enliven the senses.
“Jean-Jacques Lequeu: Visionary Architect” at the Menil Drawing Center in Houston exhibits a selection of Lequeu’s architectural works, portraiture and erotic drawings. At the end of his life, after unsuccessfully trying to sell lots of his more than 800 drawings, Lequeu donated these illustrations to the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris in 1825. More than 100 years later, the works were rediscovered and a selection eventually was exhibited in Paris and the United States in the 1960s, influencing a generation of artists such as Claes Oldenburg.
During the pre-revolutionary years, Lequeu was trained as an architect and recognized by his teachers and peers as a master draftsman. However, with the turmoil of the political revolution and its intellectual repercussions which questioned the styles of forms of architecture, job opportunities for architects were sparse and he was employed in Paris as a cartographer, surveyor and draftsman. In the Napoleonic era, Lequeu mapped the growing French Empire of the early 19th-century. Lequeu’s drawings are inspired both by foreign architecture of French colonies and other nonwestern cultures in addition to the format of the illustrated and text entries of Denis Diderot’s Encyclopedia project of the 1750s. Works of civic and landscape architecture are rendered in precise geometric and organic forms, with smaller bodies of detailed texts explaining materials and sources of inspiration despite the impossibility of their construction.
The architectural drawings on display in the exhibition creatively imagine global structures in blueprints with detailed notes of the influencing styles, mythologies and materials needed in the buildings’ construction. Works like the “The Barn and the Gate to the Hunting Pleasure Grounds” amusingly propose that the architecture of the barn be structured into the shape of a giant cow, its bovine occupants entering the building through the “front legs.” The “Gate” depicts both its function with the taxidermized trophy heads flanking a series of column as well as engages the senses, with text describing the material and smell: “carved in pigstone, a lime-like substance mixed with sulfur which, when rubbed, gives off a smell of cat’s urine, rotten egg and sulfur.”
The gardens and grottoes depicted by Lequeu similarly are accompanied by smaller bodies of text in the style of encyclopedic entry. In “Le bosquet taillé de l’Aurore est sur la hauteur du grand parc, à l’orient,” loosely translated as “The cut grove of Aurora, at the highest point of a large park, east view,” a painstakingly manicured private garden captured at sunrise plays with various interpretations of the east. From the explicit reference to Aurora, the Roman goddess of the dawn, depicted emerging from the central willow trees, to architectural inspiration from Arabic styles encountered by French colonizers in North Africa “east,” Lequeu’s work creatively interprets the many ways “east” can be illustrated.
The grottoes that Lequeu illustrates can be traced to influences in Roman mythology with natural caves with water sources understood as the home of nymphs and the Muses, inspiring the construction of manmade grottoes in many 15th and 16th-century Italian Renaissance villas. “Section perpindiculaire de la caverne un peu travaillée du petit parc, des jardins delectable d’Isis, clos rondement; et que la compagnes heureuse aux îles fortunes environne; Sepulchre de l’auteur, frère de Jésus; il a porté sa croix toute sa vie” prominently features such a grotto, with the mythic Isis as its central figure hidden in an underground cavern. In the top right hand of the image, Lequeu imagines a sepulcher for his embalmment, a monument formed of columns of parallelepiped rectangles, or a prism formed of six parallelograms, carved with both representations of the architect and his tools, including a compass, quills, rulers and pencils. Even though none of Lequeu’s drawings were developed into real structures, nor had they received recognition in his day, the architect memorializes himself and his profession in a monumental format reserved for renowned contemporaries in science, government, arts, religion or monarchs.
In the grotto image and reflected throughout many of his works of civil architecture, is Lequeu’s interest in anatomy, with forms of the building having corporeal characteristics, such as the curves of a woman’s body or in the case of “Section perpindiculaire de la caverne un peu travaillée du petit parc…,” a woman on her back with her knees bent, with the center cave cut out emulating the vaginal opening of a woman giving birth. In the explanatory texts accompanying such architectural drawings, other bodily references such as “orifices” describe various passages illustrated in the works.
One series of portraits displayed in “Jean-Jacques Lequeu: Visionary Architect” explores the architect’s interest in facial physiognomy. From grimaces with his tongue sticking out to a yawn and a contorted facial expression with a prominent wink, Lequeu precisely renders a variety of expressions.
In the spirit of post-revolutionary sexual liberation, a small selection of four erotic works engage both with this interest in anatomy and architecture. Whether featuring a nude female occupying an architectural space like “Il est libre” from the early 19th-century or in the work “Et nous aussi nous serons mères” (1793/1794) with a nun flashing a breast to the viewer, Lequeu charges classical forms with an erotic spirit. While the Menil Drawing Center exhibition takes a tame approach in mostly focusing on Lequeu’s civil and landscape architectural drawings, the preceding exhibition at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris earlier this year included dozens more erotic drawings, further illustrating the architects desire to use bodily forms to generate a new architectural language.
“Jean-Jacques Lequeu: Visionary Architect” is on view through Jan. 5 at The Menil Drawing Institute at the Menil Collection Campus, located at 1533 Sul Ross St. in Houston.
For more information, check out www.menil.org.
Story by Caitlin Duerler, ISSUE staff writer