Jacques Villeglé
Encyclopedia
Brittany
Brittany is a cultural and administrative region in the north-west of France. Previously a kingdom and then a duchy, Brittany was united to the Kingdom of France in 1532 as a province. Brittany has also been referred to as Less, Lesser or Little Britain...
) is a French
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
mixed-media artist and affichiste
Affichiste
Artists Raymond Hains and Jacques Villeglé explored, during the early 1950s, a new way of making collages from fragments of torn posters. Because of that specific innovative technique, they took the name "affichistes" . An exhibit of their works in 1957 termed their works affiches lacérées ....
famous for his alphabet
Alphabet
An alphabet is a standard set of letters—basic written symbols or graphemes—each of which represents a phoneme in a spoken language, either as it exists now or as it was in the past. There are other systems, such as logographies, in which each character represents a word, morpheme, or semantic...
with symbolic letters and decollage
Décollage
Décollage, in art, is the opposite of collage; instead of an image being built up of all or parts of existing images, it is created by cutting, tearing away or otherwise removing, pieces of an original image. Examples include inimage or etrécissements and excavations...
with ripped or lacerated poster
Poster
A poster is any piece of printed paper designed to be attached to a wall or vertical surface. Typically posters include both textual and graphic elements, although a poster may be either wholly graphical or wholly text. Posters are designed to be both eye-catching and informative. Posters may be...
s. He builds posters in which one has been placed over another or others, and the top poster or posters have been ripped, revealing to a greater or lesser degree the poster or posters underneath. He is a member of the Nouveau Réalisme art group (1960–1963). His work has primarily focused on the anonymous and on the marginal remains of civilization.
Villeglé first started producing art in 1947 in Saint-Malo
Saint-Malo
Saint-Malo is a walled port city in Brittany in northwestern France on the English Channel. It is a sub-prefecture of the Ille-et-Vilaine.-Demographics:The population can increase to up to 200,000 in the summer tourist season...
by collecting found objects (steel wires, bricks from Saint-Malo's Atlantic retaining wall). In December 1949, he concentrated his work on ripped advertising posters from the street. Working with fellow artist Raymond Hains
Raymond Hains
Raymond Hains was a French artist and photographer.-Biography:In 1945, Hains briefly enrolled in the sculpture course at the École des Beaux-Arts, Rennes and met Jacques de la Villeglé that same year. He then collaborated with E. Sougez as a photographer for France-Illustration...
, Villeglé began to use collage
Collage
A collage is a work of formal art, primarily in the visual arts, made from an assemblage of different forms, thus creating a new whole....
and found/ripped posters from street advertisements in creating Ultra-Lettrist
Ultra-Lettrist
The Ultra-Lettrist movement was an art form developed by Jean-Louis Brau, Gil J Wolman, and Francois Dufrêne, in the 1950's, when they split from Isidore Isou's Lettrism....
psychogeographical hypergraphics in the 1950s, and in June 1953, he published Hepérile Éclaté, a phonetic poem by Camille Bryen, which was made unreadable when read through strips of grooved glass made by Hains. In February 1954, Villeglé and Hains met the Lettrism
Lettrism
Lettrism is a French avant-garde movement, established in Paris in the mid-1940s by Romanian immigrant Isidore Isou. In a body of work totaling hundreds of volumes, Isou and the Lettrists have applied their theories to all areas of art and culture, most notably in poetry, film, painting and...
poet François Dufrêne, and this latter introduced them to Yves Klein
Yves Klein
Yves Klein was a French artist considered an important figure in post-war European art. He is the leading member of the French artistic movement of Nouveau réalisme founded in 1960 by the art critic Pierre Restany...
, Pierre Restany
Pierre Restany
Pierre Restany , was an internationally known French art critic and cultural philosopher.Restany was born in Amélie-les-Bains-Palalda, Pyrénées-Orientales, and spent his childhood in Casablanca. On returning to France in 1949 he attended the Lycée Henri-IV before studying at universities in France,...
and Jean Tinguely
Jean Tinguely
Jean Tinguely was a Swiss painter and sculptor. He is best known for his sculptural machines or kinetic art, in the Dada tradition; known officially as metamechanics...
. In 1958, Villeglé published an overview of his work on ripped posters, Des Réalités collectives, which is to a certain degree a prefiguration of the manifesto of the New Realism group (1960) which he joined at its inception.
External links
- Centre Pompidou, Paris Press release: Jacques Villeglé 2008
- Centre d’art contemporain de Quimper Jacques Villeglé
- Stiftung Ahlers Pro Arte, Hanover (German)