This week’s Nun of the Week from Dr. Omed is strangely compelling stuff.
“And we also will be mothers, because…!”
Jean-Jacques LequeuJean-Jacques Lequeu (1757-1820?) is known chiefly through his donation of drawings and manuscripts to the Bibliotheque Nationale; these included Architecture civile and Nouvelle methode. Duboy suggests that the Lequeu papers may have been altered or fabricated by Marcel Duchamp for the purpose of attacking LeCorbusier. His Lewd Figures is perhaps the oddest feature of the whole collection. The drawings are accompanied by long captions, misspelt and ungrammatical, but written in a flawless bureaucratic hand. The artist’s marginalia provide insights into his visions, which seem dominated by an obsession with petrified forms and a recurring preoccupation with sex. Interleaved with the drawings are curious autobiographical papers. Lequeu was not an architect at all but a government bureaucrat, a draftsman who ended up living in a brothel. Between the brothel and the obscure office from which he was eventually fired, he produced his “encyclopedia of the universe” – bizarre portraits of nuns baring their breasts and other lewd figures, and architectural fantasies of vast imaginary cities.
Dr Omed found it via Miss Wurzel Tod.
