French Sculptor of Origami

Eric Joisel and Origami House, Japan - Eric Joisel recently with a meticulously costumed character from his commedia dell’arte series.



It is no small thing to make a hedgehog. The first time Eric Joisel tried it, it took nearly six years. But what a hedgehog it turned out to be: folded from a single sheet of paper, each crenellation sharp as the crease in a new pair of trousers, it captures the very essence of hedgehogness. Mr. Joisel, a solitary Frenchman who was widely regarded as one of the most illustrious origami artists in the world, died on Oct. 10 in Argenteuil, outside Paris. He was 53 and lived nearby in Sannois. The cause was lung cancer, said Vanessa Gould, a filmmaker whose 2009 documentary about modern origami masters, “Between the Folds,” features him prominently. Not for Mr. Joisel were the paper boats and wobbly tables that have embodied origami for generations of children. His pieces, which can fetch thousands of dollars, have been exhibited around the world, including at the Louvre, and are in many private collections.

Making an origami bird is one of my earliest memories; it was taught to us by Señora Guzmán, perhaps in third grade.


Originally trained as a sculptor, Mr. Joisel was largely self-taught in origami, and his work resembles that of no other artist in the genre. Part sculpture, part paper-folding and all rigorous engineering, his art embodies people, animals and fantasy figures in an array of dimensions from palm-size to life-size. To devise the blueprint for a single figure could take him years. To fold one could take hundreds of hours — a very large work might entail a rectangle of paper measuring more than 15 feet by 25 feet, roughly the size of a New York studio apartment. No two figures were precisely alike.

“Origami is very difficult,” Mr. Joisel wrote in English in an introductory passage on his Web site. “When people ask how long it takes me to make a sculpture I say ‘35 years,’ because that is how long it’s taken me to get to this level.”

In origami parlance, Mr. Joisel was a wet-folder, dampening his paper so that he could coax it into sinuous curves. His earliest work centered on animals: besides the hedgehog, there was a turtle, a leaping fish, a magnificent sea horse and much else. He later progressed to people, making haunting, atavistic masks and, eventually, entire human forms. His best-known recent art includes a bevy of musicians, each less than a foot high, with minute sculptured details like furrowed brows and veined, careworn hands. Each holds a tiny instrument — a tuba, a saxophone, a harp, a violin — also made of paper. Other pieces include a set of meticulously costumed characters from the commedia dell’arte.

Mr. Joisel often circulated patterns for his work, and to see one renders his art simultaneously approachable and unattainable. No lay person should even contemplate the hedgehog. It is barely possible, however, to make Mr. Joisel’s handsome rat, instructions for which can be found at http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/arts/JoiselRat.pdf.