Édouard Levé

Édouard Levé (1 January 1965 – 15 October 2007) was a French writer, photographer, and painter.

Early career

Levé was born in Neuilly-sur-Seine on 1 January 1965. He was self-taught as an artist and studied business at the elite ESSEC Business School. He began painting in 1991. Levé made abstract paintings but abandoned the field (claiming to have burned most of his paintings) and took up color photography upon his return from an influential two-month trip to India in 1995.

Books and photographs

Levé's first book, ''Oeuvres'' (2002), is an imaginary list of more than 500 non-existent conceptual artworks by the author, although some of the ideas were taken up as the premises of later projects actually completed by Levé (for example the photography books ''Amérique'' and ''Pornographie'').

Levé traveled in the United States in 2002, writing ''Autoportrait'' and taking the photographs for the series ''Amérique'', which pictures small American towns named after cities in other countries. ''Autoportrait'' consists entirely of disconnected, unparagraphed sentences of the authorial speaker's assertions and self-description,Zadie Smith, "New Books," ''Harper's Magazine'', May 2011, pp. 67–70. a "collection of fragments" by a "literary cubist."

His final book, ''Suicide,'' although fictional, evokes the suicide of his childhood friend 20 years earlier, which he had also mentioned in "a shocking little addendum, tucked nonchalantly...into ''Autoportrait''." He delivered the manuscript to his editor ten days before he took his own life at 42 years old.

Reception and influence

A chapter in Hervé Le Tellier's novel '' Enough About Love'' pays homage to Edouard Levé, who appears as the character Hugues Léger, and to his book ''Autoportrait'', the introspective and fragmentary style of which is imitated in an extract of a book titled ''Definition''.

Gérard Gavarry's book ''Expérience d'Edward Lee, Versailles'' (P.O.L., 2009) takes as its inspiration one hundred photos by Levé.

Awards and honors

*2013 Best Translated Book Award, shortlist, ''Autoportrait''

Works by Levé

;Photography series
* 1999: ''Homonymes'' (portraits of ordinary people with the same names as famous people)
* 1999: ''Rêves Reconstitués''
* 2000–2002: ''Angoisse'', Philéas Fogg (photographs taken around the city of Angoisse, whose name in French means "anguish")
* 2001–2002: ''Actualités'' (staged and anonymized photos playing on the stereotypes of press photography)
* 2002: ''Pornographie'' (clothed models in pornographic positions)
* 2003: ''Rugby'' (models in street clothing posed in rugby positions sans ball)
* 2003: ''Quotidien'' (newspaper or magazine photographs, restaged with actors who are anonymized and in everyday clothing against a black backgroundBernd Schwandt, "Group Photography as a Means of Communicating with Groups," in Fine and Schwandt (eds.), ''Applied communication in organizational and international contexts'', Röhrig Universitätsverlag, 2008, pp. 31f.)
* 2003: ''Reconstitutions'', Philéas Fogg, (bringing together the restaged photographs of ''Actualités'' and ''Quotidien'')
* 2006: ''Fictions'', P.O.L ("enigmatic" groups of black-clad people against a black backgroun

http://www.pol-editeur.com/index.php?spec=livre&ISBN=2-84682-147-X])
* 2006: ''Amérique'', Léo Scheer, (photographs from American towns sharing names with world cities)
;Other books
* 2002: ''Oeuvres'', P.O.L
* 2004: ''Journal'', P.O.L (playing on journalistic stereotypes in the fashion of ''Actualités'')
* 2005: ''Autoportrait'', P.O.L
English translation
2012, Dalkey Archive Press,
* 2008: ''Suicide'', P.O.L
English translation
2011, Dalkey Archive Press,

References

Further reading

*
*Stéphane Girard, ''Plasticien, écrivain, suicidé. Ethos auctorial et paratopie suicidaire chez Édouard Levé'', Paris, L'Harmattan, "Sémantiques", 2014.

External links

*Galerie Loevenbruck (Levé's artistic representation)
Photographsbiographybooksreviews and pressEditions P.O.L.
(Levé's publisher), including a video of the author reading from ''Œuvres''
Short essay on Levé's aesthetics, focusing particularly on ''Works''
*Written works online
Excerpt from Lorin Stein's English translation of ''Autoportrait''
(''Paris Review'')
Photo series ''Amérique''
*Obituary notices
''Libération''
by Philippe Lançon, 17 October 2007
by Jacques Morice
''Télérama'', 22 October 2007
*Adaptations/homages by other artists
Autoportrait(s)
an online graphic design tribute to Levé (Grand Prix ETPA 2010) by Anne Gardes

a 2008 theatrical work by Jade Duviquet, adapted in part from Levé's ''Autoportrait''

{{DEFAULTSORT:Leve, Edouard
1965 births
2007 deaths
2007 suicides
20th-century French male artists
20th-century French male writers
20th-century French painters
French male painters
French male writers
French photographers
Artists who died by suicide
Suicides by hanging in France