Modernism is now presenting 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.
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.”
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.