Jean-Jacques Lequeu: Visionary Architect

The public are invited to celebrate the opening of Jean-Jacques Lequeu: Visionary Architect, Drawings from the Bibliothèque nationale de France, on view October 4, 2019–January 5, 2020 in the Menil Drawing Institute. Join the Menil Drawing Institute building with extended hours from 7 to 9 p.m. This program is free and open to everyone.

About the exhibition
Draftsman and architect Jean-Jacques Lequeu (1757–1826) is now considered to be one of the most inventive artists of post-revolutionary France. His spectacularly detailed drawings range from proposals submitted to government entities to fantastic and speculative structures that were never intended to be constructed. They depict anatomical studies and civic infrastructure along with curious oddities such as a towering stable in the shape of a cow. Jean-Jacques Lequeu: Visionary Architect, Drawings from the Bibliothèque nationale de France explores the artist’s wildly imaginative architectural drawings for projects that were never realized in part due to the political turmoil caused by the French Revolution and also because the designs, though carefully executed on paper, were often impossible to build.

Lequeu’s work was included in the 1967 exhibition Visionary Architects, a presentation of 18th century French architectural drawings supported by the Menil Foundation. After its showing at the University of St. Thomas, Houston, the exhibition travelled to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, where it influenced a number of young artists. Sol LeWitt and Claes Oldenburg, for example, are known to have closely studied the fanciful and obsessive peculiarities of Lequeu’s work. Several of the drawings that were included in Visionary Architects will be shown at the Menil Drawing Institute in the forthcoming presentation.