Anatomy of a subversive project

Le rendez-vous de Bellevue est à la pointe du Rocher by Jean-Jacques Lequeu

Abstract

Jean-Jacques Lequeu was born in Rouen in 1757. He moved to Paris in 1778. He found employment as an architect in a prestigious firm. He is probably the best draughtsman of the time. His lavish is practically unsurpassable. A benevolent future seems to await him. Eleven years later, the revolution broke out, the wealthy aristocratic clientele disappeared, and the ateliers were closed. Lequeu will soon find a modest job at the land registry. His life doubled: at work, he drew surveys and road alignments, when he returned home, he wrote and illustrated a theoretical treatise, Civil Architecture, which would never see the light of day. This will be his life for twenty-five years: clerk by day, dreamy treatise writer by night. He would die in 1828 and see the French Revolution, the Terror, the Napoleonic Empire, and the Restoration succeed in a short time. He saw the beginning of modernity, and he also saw its end. He experienced first the dark side of the Enlightenment and then the suffocating atmosphere of bureaucratic modernity. He seems plagued by identity problems and obsessively portrays himself: frontally, in profile, transfigured as a lady, as a child, as a whore, with mocking, suffering, rebellious, insane expressions. In his treatise, Lequeu draws architecture that seems animated by the desire to break any norm, the idea of normality. The best-known drawing, Le Rendez-Vous de Bellevue est à la pointe du Rocher, concentrates on architectural sadism, a project where each constituent element maintains its own identity thanks to the deformations that disfigure it and stage an irremediable conflict with all the others, even though the skilful play of weights and counterweights forces them to stand together in a reconciled manner. With the help of the photo-retouching technique, this contribution will attempt to reconstruct the logical steps by which Lequeu transforms a bare, rational, orthodox villa into a cruel caricature.