JEAN-JACQUE LEQUEU
Late Eighteenth Century Enlightenment
Emil Kaufmann resurrected the work of Jean-Jacques Lequeu in his Von Ledoux bis Le Corbusier in 1933. And in 1952, his Three Revolutionary Architects positioned Lequeu – behind Boullee and Ledoux – as the third in the famed trio of modernist forbearers and French Revolutionary Architects. Quoting Kaufmann:
“Anticipating the twentieth century, Boullee and Ledoux restored the elementary forms to their rightful place in architecture. […] Though Lequeu, like all Romanticists, looked back to remote times and remote regions, he was nonetheless a forerunner of a significant current in the early twentieth century.”
What Kaufmann was unaware of in his 1933 publication was a cabinet of “reserve(s)” in the Bibliotheque Nationale revealed by Helen Rosenau in the October 1950 issue of Architecture Review. Having been discreetly censored by official keepers beforehand, the new revelation contains two manuscript volumes that are Lequeu’s principal theoretical statements, a few self-physiognomic studies and meticulously accurate representations of naked women amongst other voluptuous and scandalous scenes. Although Kaufmann was aware of this “reserve” in his 1952 publication, he separated them from that year’s narrative stating, “They cannot be dealt with in this context; I am preparing a separate essay on them.”
In the previous year, (1949) Rosenau also published a short article in AR revealing “for the first time assembled and analysed” works of Lequeu. This publication also lacked knowledge of the reserve - what Kaufmann called, Lequeu’s “non-architectural drawings”. So in this absence, Rosenau also argued for the equal status of Lequeu in standing with Boullee or at least Ledoux, in terms of representing the architecture style of what she stated as “French Revolution”.
In the late 1980’s two major works reflected on the complete archive of Lequeu in the Bibliotheque Nationale. Published in 1986, Philippe Duboy’s Lequeu, An Architectural Enigma meticulously delved into the archive presenting hundreds of intriguing drawings and strange clues hinting that Lequeu is the “pataphysical alter ego of Marcel Duchamp”. Duboy revealed that Duchamp had access to Lequeu’s archival drawings – including the non-architectural ones - through friendships with curators and bookbinders at the Bibliotheque Nationale. Reviewing Duboy’s Lequeu, Barry Bergdoll asks, “Did Duchamp tamper with the drawings, and if so what did he add and what were his motivations?” It could be easily speculated from Duboy’s not so subtle hints that Lequeu didn’t exist at all but was just a mere fabrication of Duchamp who at the moment is laughing in his grave at Kaufmann, Corbusier and all the twentieth century modernist who looked to Lequeu as a forbearer.
In the second 1980’s reflection, Anthony Vidler (1987) aligned Lequeu in another trio of late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century radicals. This time Lequeu is the third in line with Marquis De Sade and Charles Fourier. Vidler avoids claiming their revolutionary roles and instead proposes that their actions “were elaborate blueprints for alternative societies and means of expression, [as] symptoms rather than sources of change.” But for Vidler, Lequeu went the furthest to implicated his disparage authority, stating, out of the three, Lequeu “discovered the way to undermine architecture at the very point that late-eighteenth-century theory had proposed to situate its authenticity: the proper expression of truly rooted character.”
The wide breath could not have been avoided given the manner in which Lequeu left his drawings and the surprise revelation of a more contentious volume of drawings. In the pre-“reserve” revelation, Kaufmann and Rosenau saw only the outwardly presentable images authored by Lequeu – framed by the Bibliotheque Nationale portraying Lequeu a tragic revolutionary. When the “reserve” drawings were revealed, the more private images of and by Lequeu began to characterize him in a different manner, a more complete and unhidden manner, but one that was not necessarily more authentic or clear. It is curious how we come to terms with the attitudes that lead to this sequence of revelation of the content by Lequeu, and how the contents latch onto notions of before and after, exterior and interior, public and private.
This paper seeks to examine this bifurcation of the Lequeurian character in history through his own authored hands. The focus will beon two volumes of drawings in his “reserve” stacks that were revealed through the separate researches of Kaufmann and Rosenau. The first will be one of his manuscripts. Entitled Nouvelle Methode, Lequeu theorizes the proportions and geometry of the human face to the codification of physiognomy and character. He animates these proportions in the manuscript with a drawing method intended to aid draughtsmen in reproducing the harmony of the countenance. The second will be on his actual practice of self-portraiture: these include several physiognomic studies that were somewhere between “Le Brun’s or Messerschmidt’s drawings of human expressions on the one hand, and Gericault’s paintings of madmen on the other.” These physiognomy proportions will be measured against his own treatise and immediate predecessors and contemporaries to test the manner in which Lequeu practiced his portraiture: whether critically and cryptically expressive or technically memetic.
This practice will also be overlaid onto the changing understandings of character from antiquity and the Renaissance to the classical and then the scientific. According to Michel Foucault, the Renaissance was the age of analogy where knowledge, whether found in the heavens or on plants and animals on earth, formed a complex network of affinities linking anything to everything. Signs were freed from analogy in the classical age and therefore each individual object potentially had its own taxonomic table according to time-honored rules. Through this classical taxonomy of signs, physiognomy now becomes a useful comparative analysis for the connection and understanding between body and soul, to express the passion through physical appearance. Later Durand and Quetelet detaches character from appearances and therefore appearance no longer is an expression of passion but now the result of internal vital processes of anatomy.
Lequeu becomes extremely relevant in this context, especially when his Nouvelle Methode is juxtaposed with his self-portrait physiognomic studies. There is a relationship between character and countenance, between pathognomy and physiognomy, between Lequeu’s external face and internal passion. It’s highly plausible that he recognizes this relationship and manipulates it into whatever ways fits his temperament. Whether overtly, convertly or unconsciously, his exploration, explication and seemingly operative mastery of physiognomy makes Lequeu the author of his own future interpretations and relegates the future history as wayward readers.
In 1825 one year before his death Lequeu is recounted to have submitted all his works – piles upon piles of his drawing to the Bibliotheque Nationale. This include all his unpublished manuscripts, architectural draftings and the whole of his “non-architectural drawings” that would ultimately go into the reserve cabinet. This unfiltered state of his drawings both at the same time can be said to collapse of his entire library of drawings in to an incoherent and incomprehensible body (presentation) but can also be seen as the nascent condition that was pre divided into presentable archive and locked up reserve. It is the Bibliotheque that delineates the one pile into two and frame Lequeu’s reception and re-reception in history.
Just as physiognomy has to reflect the character, the mirrors used for physiognomic self-portraits must have two reflections: one to look at yourself and the other to reflect the reflection: as you actually would appear to the world. For Lequeu the reflection is the adherence to physiognomy, it is both classical and scientific, but through the reflection of the reflection, he undermines both and reverses his image again into the mystic of origins and ornament. His two mirrors are analogy and irony. “In the adoption of analogy, he forged an operative relationship with the natural world. In his adoption of irony, he set to transgress the social order.”
