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, as well as 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 been interpreted and has proven to be fruitful for scholars and architects over the past two centuries.
Held Wednesday, September 2, 2020.