Jacques Villeglé, born Jacques Mahé de la Villeglé (27 March 1926 – 6 June 2022) was a French

mixed-media In visual art, mixed media describes artwork in which more than one medium or material has been employed. Assemblages, collages, and sculpture are three common examples of art using different media. Materials used to create mixed media art inc ...

artist and affichiste famous for his

alphabet An alphabet is a standard set of letter (alphabet), letters written to represent particular sounds in a spoken language. Specifically, letters largely correspond to phonemes as the smallest sound segments that can distinguish one word from a ...

with symbolic letters and decollage with ripped or lacerated

poster A poster is a large sheet that is placed either on a public space to promote something or on a wall as decoration. Typically, posters include both typography, textual and graphic elements, although a poster may be either wholly graphical or w ...

s. He was a member of the

Nouveau Réalisme A ''nouveau'' ( ), or ''vin (de) primeur'', is a wine which may be sold in the same year in which it was harvested. The most widely exported ''nouveau'' wine is French wine Beaujolais ''nouveau'' which is released on the third Thursday of ...

art group (1960–1970). His work is primarily focused on the anonymous and on the marginal remains of civilization. The sociologist

Zygmunt Bauman Zygmunt Bauman (; ; 19 November 1925 – 9 January 2017) was a Polish–British sociologist and philosopher. He was driven out of the Polish People's Republic during the 1968 Polish political crisis and forced to give up his Polish citizenship. ...

has qualified him as one of the most outstanding exponents of liquid art, in his work ''Liquid Life'', together with

Herman Braun-Vega Herman Braun-Vega (7 July 1933 in Lima — 2 April 2019 in Paris) was a Peruvian painter and artist. Although his work has always been figurative, it was at first (before 1970) close to abstraction. It experienced a decisive turning point when t ...

and Manolo Valdés.

Biography

Villeglé first started producing art in 1947 in

Saint-Malo Saint-Malo (, , ; Gallo language, Gallo: ; ) is a historic French port in Ille-et-Vilaine, Brittany (administrative region), Brittany. The Fortification, walled city on the English Channel coast had a long history of piracy, earning much wealth ...

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 (9 November 1926 – 28 October 2005) was a French visual artist and a founder of the Nouveau réalisme movement. In 1960, he signed, along with Arman, François Dufrêne, Yves Klein, Jean Tinguely, Jacques Villeglé and P ...

, Villeglé began to use

collage Collage (, from the , "to glue" or "to stick together") is a technique of art creation, primarily used in the visual arts, but in music too, by which art results from an assembly of different forms, thus creating a new whole. (Compare with pasti ...

and found/ripped posters from street advertisements in creating

Ultra-Lettrist The Ultra-Lettrist art movement was developed by Jean-Louis Brau, Gil J. Wolman, and François Dufrêne in the 1950s when they split from Isidore Isou's Lettrism movement. Dufrêne created a phonetic poetry movement which breaks the structures ...

psychogeographical

hypergraphics Hypergraphy, also called hypergraphics or metagraphics, is an experimental form of visual communication developed by the Lettrist movement. Hypergraphy abandons the phonetic values communicated by most conventional written languages in favor of ...

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.

Posters

He built 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.

Ultra-lettrist

In February 1954, Villeglé and Hains met the

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 cultur ...

poet

François Dufrêne François () is a French masculine given name and surname, equivalent to the English name Francis. People with the given name * François Amoudruz (1926–2020), French resistance fighter * François-Marie Arouet (better known as Voltaire; ...

, and this latter introduced them to

Yves Klein Yves Klein (; 28 April 1928 – 6 June 1962) was a French artist and an important figure in post-war European art. He was a leading member of the French artistic movement of Nouveau réalisme founded in 1960 by art critic Pierre Restany. Klein wa ...

Pierre Restany Pierre Restany (22 June 1930 – 29 May 2003), 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 ...

, and

Jean Tinguely Jean Tinguely (22 May 1925 – 30 August 1991) was a Swiss sculptor best known for his kinetic art sculptural machines (known officially as Métamatics) that extended the Dada tradition into the later part of the 20th century.Chilvers, Ian; Gl ...

Nouveau réalisme

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.

Bibliography

* ''Poesie der Großstadt. Die Affichisten''. Bernard Blistène, Fritz Emslander, Esther Schlicht, Didier Semin, Dominique Stella. Snoeck, Köln 2014,

References

External links

Studio of Jacques Villeglé by Marion Chanson
*https://ddabretagne.org/fr/artistes/jacques-villegle/bio-biblio Bibliographie of Villeglé
Jacques Villeglé a tribute
documentary with artworks taken from an exhibition in

Italy Italy, officially the Italian Republic, is a country in Southern Europe, Southern and Western Europe, Western Europe. It consists of Italian Peninsula, a peninsula that extends into the Mediterranean Sea, with the Alps on its northern land b ...

Padua Padua ( ) is a city and ''comune'' (municipality) in Veneto, northern Italy, and the capital of the province of Padua. The city lies on the banks of the river Bacchiglione, west of Venice and southeast of Vicenza, and has a population of 20 ...

, 2012. Video released by art critic and curator dr Alain Chivilò
Villeglé at MoMA Museum
New York

(German)
Jacques Villeglé La comédie urbaine
Centre Pompidou, 2019 {{DEFAULTSORT:Villegle, Jacques 1926 births 2022 deaths People from Quimper French mixed-media artists French collage artists French poster artists Nouveau réalisme artists French contemporary artists 20th-century French artists 20th-century French male artists 21st-century French artists 21st-century French male artists