Virtual art tour (inspired by The Art Issue of The New York Review of Books): Jean-Jacques Lequeu

Jean-Jacques Lequeu: Porte de sortie du parc des plaisirs, de la chasse du prince, 1800. Photo: Wikipedia from: "Klassizismus und Romantik. 1750-1848", Hrsg. Rolf Toman, Verlag Ullmann und Könemann, Sonderausgabe, ISDN 978-3-8331-3555-2

Jean-Jacques Lequeu: Ce quelle voit en songe. Material description : 1 dess. : plume, lavis, en coul. ; 34 x 41,6 cm (f.) Technique de l'image : dessin. - plume. - lavis d'encre. Sources : Jean-Jacques Lequeu : bâtisseur de fantasmes / sous la direction de Laurent Baridon, Jean-Philippe Garric et Martial Guédron, Bibliothèque nationale de France et Éditions Norma, 2018, n. 122. Dessinateur : Jean-Jacques Lequeu (1757-1826). Source: BnF Gallica.

Jean Jacque Le Queu, J.ur, architecte. Material description : 1 dess. : plume, lavis, en coul. ; 45 x 31 cm (f.). Note : Technique de l'image : dessin. - plume. - lavis d'encre. Note : L'artiste s'est représenté dans une niche, entouré de volumes portant les noms de plusieurs de ses projets, entre autres : "Détails de Batimens", "Plan de la ville de Paris", "Des cartes de géographie", "Les principes géométriques de dessin", "L'église paroissiale de St Germain en Laye", "Le grand hospice d'humanité pour la ville de Bordeaux", "Grand hôtel de ville", "Outils nécessaire pour le blanchissage du linge fin", "Le casin de Grawensel dessiné à la manière du lavis". Bien que daté par l'artiste de 1792, le dessin a manifestement été terminé plus tardivement, les titres de certaines des réalisations figurant au dos des livres correspondant à des projets postérieurs à la date de 1792. Sources : Jean-Jacques Lequeu : bâtisseur de fantasmes / sous la direction de Laurent Baridon, Jean-Philippe Garric et Martial Guédron, Bibliothèque nationale de France et Éditions Norma, 2018, n. 1. Dessinateur : Jean-Jacques Lequeu (1757-1826). Source: BnF Gallica.

The New York Review of Books: The Art Issue, 14 May 2020.
Corona lockdown art museum visits.

For the first time in the 125-year old history of the cinema, movie theatres are closed worldwide. The same with museums and galleries. In an innovative way, The New York Review of Books has dedicated an issue for art exhibitions that can be visited online. It's not the same thing but better than nothing! I started two weeks ago with my first one, Gerhard Richter: Painting After All (Met Breuer, New York). The visual quality of the museums' digital tours is high. They are worth visiting on a good television screen.

Following the NYRB Art Issue page by page, my next exhibition is Jean-Jacques Lequeu, introduced by an essay by James Fenton: "What He Saw in a Dream".

Virtual visit:
Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF): 817 documents by Jean-Jacques Lequeu.
The Morgan Library & Museum, New York City: Jean-Jacques Lequeu: Visionary Architect. Drawings from the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

The introduction of The Morgan Library & Museum: "Six months before he died in poverty and obscurity, architect and draftsman Jean‐Jacques Lequeu (1757–1826) donated one more than 800 drawings, one of the most singular and fascinating graphic oeuvres of his time, to the French Royal Library. They remained there, in the institution that would become the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF). The Morgan Library & Museum is proud to be the first institution in New York City to present a selection of these works. Some sixty of these works, the best of Lequeu’s several hundred drawings, are now on view in Jean‐Jacques Lequeu: Visionary Architect, the first museum retrospective to bring significant public and scholarly attention to one of the most imaginative architects of the Enlightenment.

Lequeu’s meticulous drawings in pen and wash include highly detailed renderings of buildings and imaginary monuments populating invented landscapes. His mission was to see and describe everything systematically—from the animal to the organic, from erotic fantasy to his own visage. Solitary and obsessive, he created the fantastic worlds shown in his drawings without ever leaving his studio, and enriched them with characters and stories drawn from his library." (The Morgan Library & Museum)

AA: Jean-Jacques Lequeu is a truly unknown master, and in his NYRB essay James Fenton explains why: "The reputation of an artist, and the understanding of his or her work, can be adversely affected if all that work happens, for some reason, to be kept in one place. Normally when an artist dies there is a process of dissemination of the work, which gets divided in the first instance among family members and collectors, and then among museums, and then through auctions and so forth. Practically every one of the almost eight hundred drawings Lequeu left is at the National Library in Paris (the Metropolitan Museum in New York has some). So until the present show, the only way really to form a judgment about Lequeu would have been to secure permission to examine his drawings oneself in Paris. It is striking how the lack of sympathy evidenced by one traveling show (the one that began in Houston in 1967) must have affected Lequeu’s reputation: “a motionless and disabling universe,” “pedantic curiosity,” “meticulousness amounting to mania.” Then, after half a century, came another chance to look. And now that chance has, for the time being, gone. But at least we now know that there is something extraordinary there—and that we are missing it."

Lequeu was an artist out of step with his time during the ancient regime, the revolution and the counter-revolution. It is easy to understand the pejorative commens quoted by Fenton in his essay. But Fenton has a genuine dreamlike drive in his precisely crafted artworks. His architectural ideas are both fantastic and precise. The same goes for his sexual visions: there is no passion in them, and there is rather an affinity with a textbook of anatomy. Except that also in them Lequeu is at home in the field of dreams ("if you build it, they will come"...). For instance the middle image above, "What She Sees In a Dream" seems oddly formal at first glance, and only on closer inspection we detect details such as the winged lingami. Also the expression of a sleepwalker brings to mind surrealist painters such as Delvaux.