JACQUES MAHÉ DE LA VILLEGLÉ

A MAN WHO REMOVES POSTERS FROM PARIS / UN DÉCOLLAGISTE PARISIEN

Born in Quimper, Brittany in 1926, Jacques Villeglé – whose full name is Jacques Mahé de la Villeglé – began to study as a painter at the Rennes Academy of Art in 1944. It was there that he met Raymond Hains. They were brought together by a mutual dissatisfaction with the artistic education they were receiving, and the two outsiders became friends. Villeglé switched to architecture and went to Nantes, whereas Hains dropped out of his degree and moved to Paris. But architecture proved an equally unhappy choice for Villeglé. He preferred long walks along the Atlantic coast, during which he would come across objects he combined into sculptures. These included pieces made from steel and iron wire, which Hains mentions in his letters. Hains, for his part, had meanwhile discovered tearing down posters on the street as a manifestation of art. He began simply by taking photographs of them, and later took a more active role and mounted torn-down posters on canvas.

In 1949, Villeglé joined him in Paris; for the next five years, the duo worked together on developing the technique of décollage. Their first joint piece is Ach Alma Manetro, named after the fragments of words that are visible on the torn pieces of poster. Villeglé continued to use décollage as his main form of artistic expression in the decades that followed, whereas Hains moved to focus on the deconstruction of language, which led him to experiment with other techniques. Both artists pursued similar concepts to the other décollagistes, François Dufrêne and the Italian Mimmo Rotella. Dufrêne preferred to use the ‘painterly’ reverse side of posters in his works. In contrast to the Parisian affichiste, Rotella himself tore down posters according to the effect he was aiming to produce, rather than leave the task to anonymous passers-by. 

Taking matters into his own hands to such an extent was completely out of the question for Villeglé. He considered the artistic value of décollage to be in the anonymous way the material is ‘handled’. This is the only way it can figure as an authentic testament to its time. The pictures that stem from the attempts of passers-by to tear down posters feature a variety of different voices: encounters between past and present, the revolutionary and the reactionary, consumption and its critics, capitalism and its infiltrators. The critic Benjamin Buchloh wrote an essay on décollage in which he emphasised that it might be ‘the most undervalued and misunderstood artistic activity in post-war Europe’. 

This combination of both artistic potential and scope for social critique is the reason why Villeglé remained loyal to the technique of décollage for more than five decades. His oeuvre has been published in seven volumes in which the torn pieces are classified according to various categories; these highlight their quality not only in terms of content, but also with regards to their political and socio-economic nature, form, artistic technique and typographic style. The exhibition at the Ahlers Pro Arte Foundation features important early décollage works from the 1950s and 1960s. They powerfully communicate what Villeglé termed the ‘comédie urbaine’, a reference to Balzac’s La Comédie humaine.

The exhibition also offers the opportunity for the Ahlers Pro Arte Foundation to present Jacque Villeglé’s book La Traversée Urbi & Orbi. The foundation has had the book translated and published. Its expert author develops a theory of décollage and asserts its artistic legitimacy, although his engagement with Duchamp’s readymades also play an important role. References to influential precursors also constitute a large part of the work. These include the surrealist Léo Malet and the Dadaist Johannes Baader, whose biography Villeglé recounts in detail – all the more commendable for the fact that Baader has largely been forgotten in Germany.