Jean-Jacques Lequeu
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Jean-Jacques Lequeu (September 14, 1757 – March 28, 1826) was a French draughtsman and visionary architect.
Born in Rouen, he won a scholarship to go to Paris, but following the French revolution his architectural career never took off. Very little is known of his life. Apart from two architectural follies in the neighborhood of his native Rouen his designs were never built. His architectural oeuvre consists of drawings of often inconstructible buildings. The rest of his pictoral work, such as the autoportraits "en travesti", belong to a protosurrealist phantasm. He worked with architect Le Brument.
He spent time preparing the Architecture Civile, a book intended for publication, but which was never published. Most of his drawings can be found at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Almost all of the drawings in the so-called Figures Lascives collection are sexually explicit. Most of these drawings have been reproduced in Duboy's book Lequeu : An Architectural Enigma but some can also be found in Sade / Surreal.
He worked at the cadastre.
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Figures Lascives
Figures Lascives (English: lewd figures) is a collection of drawings by Jean-Jacques Lequeu which extend his study of physiognomy to a detailed study of male and female genitalia. The drawings are accompanied by long captions and other marginalia.
All of the drawings in the Figures Lascives collection are sexually explicit and the best-known is Le Dieu Priape which shows a rather large male phallus. The drawings have been kept in the Enfer of the French national library, until they were shown at the 2007-8 exposition Eros au secret. Many of them are reproduced in black and white in Lequeu : An Architectural Enigma.
French description
Jean-Jacques Lequeu est plutôt un visionnaire qu’un architecte. À part deux « folies » aux environs de sa ville natale, il n’a rien construit. Tout le reste de son œuvre architecturale consiste dans des dessins de bâtiments souvent inconstructibles. Le reste de son œuvre picturale, tels ses autoportraits en travesti, appartient au fantasme et a constitué une inspiration pour le surréalisme qui a vu en lui un précurseur. On ne sait pas grand-chose de sa vie. On sait qu’il a travaillé dans sa ville natale avec l’architecte Le Brument.
Il a été architecte de l’Académie royale des Sciences, Belles-Lettres, et Beaux-Arts. Il a reçu deux prix de l’Académie de Rouen en 1776 et 1778. En 1779, il travaille comme dessinateur ou inspecteur au bureau des bâtiments de l’église Sainte-Geneviève (c’est-à-dire l’agence de Jacques-Germain Soufflot). En 1793, il est employé au bureau du Cadastre. En 1802, il travaille au bureau des bâtiments civils du ministère de l’Intérieur. En juillet 1825, il donne l’ensemble de ses dessins et manuscrits à la Bibliothèque Royale.
Il est souvent considéré comme un architecte « révolutionnaire », au même titre que Étienne-Louis Boullée et Claude Nicolas Ledoux. Cette épithète ne vient pas de ce qu’ils ont révolutionné l’architecture ou qu’il aient été particulièrement engagés à cette période, mais qu’ils sont contemporains de la Révolution française.
See also
Bibliography
- Visionary Architects: Boullée, Ledoux, Lequeu by Jean-Claude Lemagny, pub. Hennessey & Ingalls; ISBN 0-940512-35-1; (July 2002)
- Lequeu : An Architectural Enigma by Philippe Duboy, pub. The MIT Press; ASIN: 0262040867 (November 29, 1986)
