Jacques VILLEGLÉ: Urban Language

ON VIEW NOW THROUGH JULY 9, 2025 Modernism is pleased to present its ninth survey of seminal French contemporary artist JACQUES VILLEGLé [1926-2022]. _Jacques VILLEGLÉ: Urban Language_ examines twenty-five décollage masterpieces by this influential Nouveau Réaliste, through the lens of typography. EXCERPTS FROM _JACQUES VILLEGLÉ AND THE STREETS OF PARIS_ BY BARNABY CONRAD III Villeglé spent most of his life wandering the streets of Paris, pulling torn advertising posters off the ancient walls and pronouncing them Art. "In seizing a poster, I seize history, he says. "What I gather is the reflection of an era." Born in Brittany in 1926, Villeglé was a seventeen-year-old architectural apprentice in Nantes during the bleak days of the German Occupation. After the Liberation in 1944, he moved to the City of Light, where he was drawn to filmmaking, avant-garde Lettrist poetry, and painting. The prewar art movements of Cubism and Surrealism had melted into abstraction, but Villeglé’s earnest attempts at Art Informel soon struck him as redundant, and he destroyed his canvases. Without a job and at loose ends intellectually, he became a _flâneur_, a curious intellectual roaming through war-scarred Paris. “As I walked through the streets, I was struck by the color and typography of the posters. In those days, the cinema and concert posters rarely had images—just words—and they had been torn and shredded to where they became something else, with a post-cubist look to them. I began to see them as paintings made by anonymous hands.” In conversation Villeglé recalled, "Even as a young student, I was always interested in typography.” In early 1940s France, Villeglé attended an exhibition of prewar posters by Paul Colin, Jean Carlu, Cassandre, and other artists at the Galerie Charpentier opposite the Palais de l'Élysée. “I could see that the poster artists had a dialogue with the cubist painters of their time. Most fascinating for me was the poster typography, the lettering itself. Months later, I returned to that gallery and bought the exhibition catalogue.” Villeglé kept this catalogue in his possession up to his passing. An avid reader, Villeglé was poking around a bookstore one day when a book caught his eye and he bought it on sale for a few francs. It was poet Blaise Cendrar's novel _La Fin du monde, filmée par l'Ange N.D._, illustrated by Fernand Léger. "The text was printed in a font used in foreign posters actually, Cheltenham gras—and Léger's illustrations were in primary colors," he recalled. "I was amazed to see this book had been printed in 1919. It seemed so modern, so fresh. It made me want to do something in the art world that was this bold." “After the war, I learned that posters inspired Stéphane Mallarmé for his poem _One Toss of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance_. Mallarmé was the pure poet. He composed his poems thinking about the compositions of posters for theater and advertising. I also knew that Georges Braque introduced letters into his cubist paintings, like Le Portugais in 1912. Early on I believed that letters gave structure to posters on an abstract level, and I looked for that in the posters I took." In 1949, Villeglé and his then artistic collaborator and life-long friend, Raymond Hains [1926-2005], began scavenging advertising from billboards on the grand boulevards, snatching political posters in the financial district, and pillaging Left Bank walls plastered with flyers for jazz concerts and art exhibitions. Mounting them on canvas, they presented them as a new kind of art. Between 1949 and 2003, Villeglé himself plucked more than 4,500 works from all twenty of Paris’s arrondissements, carefully labeling each with the exact date and street address of the poster’s origin. Each work became a unique time capsule of the ever-changing city. This selective collector of torn posters casually explained his impulsive modus operandi: "These are very rapid decisions. François Mauriac once said you should write like a sleepwalker. Was it the same for me with posters? If you see something in the street, you have no time to meditate. You strike fast, like a photographer, in less than a second, and worry about it back in the studio." Villeglé's collecting habits may have been impulsive, but early on he understood that he had tapped into an enormous river of expression. "I realized right from the start that lettering would change, that new colors would be developed, that photography would be employed someday. Electric blue didn't exist, for instance. So right from the beginning I saw this material would be historic and would constitute an archive, a ragged memory of our era." Such a time capsule of typography, _Les Dessous du Quai de la Rapée_, 21 mai 1963, appears to be an alphabet composed of tipsy, deformed letters. At the top of the picture, the words "Beaux-Arts" have been torn to spell "Faux Arts" - fake arts. Further observation reveals fragments of concert announcements for Beethoven, Rossini, Mozart, De Falla, and even Gershwin's _Porgy and Bess_ and _An American in Paris_. The letters bob in a cacophonous universe that evokes the Lettrists' typographical obsession and such Russian avante-garde artists as Iliazd (Ilya Zdanevich). The Lettrists said that poetry was made not simply of ideas or words, but of letters that could be scrambled and manipulated into new words and sounds. Villeglé and Hains went a step further: they saw that letters were ultimately graphic elements that could be distorted by human hands, whether through torn posters or by a camera lens. In 1953, Hains and Villeglé used Hains's hypnagogoscope (an original camera invention which abstracts images and words) to distort Camille Bryen's 1950 tone poem, _Hepérile_, into strange, otherworldly shapes that twisted and slithered across the page like an indecipherable chameleon alphabet. No one could read it, but it was interesting to look at. They printed it as a small book in a limited edition. Titled _Hepérile éclaté_, it became a minor hit in avant-garde circles. Even the great cubo-futurist typographer "Iliazd" (Ilya Zdanevich) got hold of a copy and raved about it. In a text circulated at that time, Villeglé wrote, "Les Lettristes ont fait éclater le mot, Les Hepérilistes font éclater la lettre" (The Lettrists shattered the word, the Hepérilists shatter the letter.) Villeglé’s work reads like a palimpsest—found, effaced and recontextualized. Inspired by Mallarmé’s spatial poetics, Léger’s bold modernism, and the Lettrists’ deconstruction of language, Villeglé used typography not as a medium to express meaning, but as material, abstract yet archival. Torn type, disjointed letterforms, and unintended alignments erode syntax so that a letter becomes more than a component of a word, and instead a visual historical record. JACQUES VILLEGLé’s work has been exhibited extensively in the UNITED STATES and Europe, and is the collections of many important museums worldwide (Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Detroit Institute of Arts; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Tate Gallery, London; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Musée d’Israël, Jerusalem). In 2008 a major retrospective of his works was exhibited at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. In 2011 Modernism published _Urbi et Orbi_, the English translation of Villeglé’s 1959 theoretical writings. Major monograph _Jacques Villeglé and the Streets of Paris_, authored by Barnaby Conrad III, was published in 2022, also by Modernism. View the exhibition. [https://modernisminc.com/exhibitions/Jacques_VILLEGLE--Urban_Language/] Gallery Hours: Tuesday-Saturday, 10:00AM-5:30PM