Where in the World is Jean-Jacques Lequeu? (Cancelled)

Wednesday, April 29, 2020, 6:30 PM

 

Public programs for Jean-Jacques Lequeu: Visionary Architect. Drawings from the Bibliothèque nationale de France and Alfred Jarry: The Carnival of Being are presented in cooperation with La Maison Française of New York University.

This program has been cancelled. We will be in contact if we are able to reschedule the program at a later date. Please contact tickets@themorgan.org with any questions.

Meredith Martin

Lequeu’s donation of more than 800 architectural drawings, letters, manuscripts and physiognomic studies to the Royal Library in Paris created a paper legacy that has confounded scholars ever since. Historians and curators have attempted to link his enigmatic oeuvre to the work of such Enlightenment visionaries as Étienne-Louis Boullée and Claude-Nicolas Ledoux; to the writings of rebellious libertines like the Marquis de Sade. In one infamous account, Lequeu was even outed as the semi-fictional brainchild of the twentieth-century artist Marcel Duchamp. In this lecture Meredith Martin, Associate Professor at New York University, will explore various ways that Lequeu’s corpus has proven to be fruitful for scholars as well as architects over the past two centuries.

The exhibition Jean-Jacques Lequeu: Visionary Architect. Drawings from the Bibliothèque nationale de France will be open at 5:30 PM for program attendees.

Jean-Jacques Lequeu (1757–1826). Frontispiece to the New method applied to the elementary principles of drawing, tending to graphically prefect the outline of the human head by means of various geometrical figures,1792. Pen and black ink, gray wash. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Departement des Estampes et de la photographie.

Please call (212) 685-0008 ext. 560 or e-mail tickets@themorgan.org for information.