Jean-Jacques Lequeu (1757-1826) worked as a civil servant, surveyor and a cartographer, but he was actually a visionary architect. Unfortunately for him, his architectural career never took off and his book "Architecture Civile" (Civil Architecture) was never published.
Yet Lequeu produced throughout his life meticulously detailed drawings in pen and wash showing imaginary buildings and monuments located in invented landscapes that he conjured up on paper without ever leaving his studio.
His style was influenced by the great competitions organised by the École des Beaux-Arts in which the participants were encouraged to send entries that weren't limited by budgetary constraints. Lequeu enjoyed therefore creating these vast structures that were never built but remained confined to the realm of "paper architecture".
Most of his drawings (some of them pornographic and grotesque as well that reveal a libertine side of the architect...) can be found at the Bibliothèque nationale de France.
They include an artificial grotto; a design for a Temple of the Earth that shows all his fascination with celestial and terrestrial globes and that featured a magnificent planetary model surrounded by a representation of the celestial firmament on the dome; a cow barn in the shape of an Assyrian bovine (when form follows function…); an entrance to a princely hunting reserve decorated with the heads of wild boar, deer, and hounds to be sculpted in "pork stone," a mix of limestone and sulfur that, according to the artist, diffused "an odor of cat urine [or] rotten egg"; a tavern devoted to eating, drinking, and cabaret performances, ornamented with tableware, bottles, and wheels of cheese and featuring columns shaped like wine barrels, and a lush garden with a hammock replete with a copulating couple.Among his fantastic structures there are several dome-shaped buildings, often resembling hot-air balloons (you can discover more about Lequeu on the site of New York's Morgan Library; the library dedicated an exhibition to Lequeu last year).
Lequeu's drawings with their pastel colours, extravagant details and scrupulous handwritten notes surrounding the structures and describing the tiniest details, fascinated many researchers who tried to discover more about him: Philippe Duboÿ even claimed in a book that his drawings were just an elaborate hoax orchestrated by none other than Marcel Duchamp (a theory that was proven wrong).
Also fashion designer Guillaume Henry fell in love with Lequeu's works and he recently turned them into prints and incorporated them in Patou's S/S 22 collection.
Combining couture volumes with everyday silhouettes, the collection includes versatile blouses and pants, elegant dresses, functional bags and bucket hats.
Henry also employed in this collection illustrations by Christian Bérard and Gustave Moreau, but Lequeu's work better as the extravagant architectures like the building in Lequeu's "L’Île d’amour et repos de pêche" and his architectural features from arches to domes, seem to perfectly adapt to the shapes and silhouettes of the various garments, especially to the panels of one mini-dress.
The pastel tones in powder pink, pale green and blue perfectly fit the classic Spring/Summer palette and you get the feeling that Lequeu may have liked the fact that, while he never managed to see his temples, majestic structures, monuments and mausolea being built, his art lives on in a contemporary fashion collection that preserves his passion for fantastically elaborate imaginary spaces.
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