Eric Joisel, 53, French Sculptor of Origami By MARGALIT FOX It is no small thing to make a hedgehog. The first time Eric Joi- sel 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 French- man who was widely regarded as one of the most illustrious origa- mi 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, “Be- tween the Folds,” features him prominently. Not for Mr, Joisel were the pa- per boats and wobbly tables that have embodied origami for gen- erations of children. His pieces, which can fetch thousands of dol- lars, have been exhibited around the’ world, including at the Louvre, and are in many private collections. Originally trained as a sculp- tor, 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 en- gineering, his art embodies peo- ple, 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 hun- dreds 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 in- troductory 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 in- cludes 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 instru- ment — a tuba, a saxophone, a harp, a violin — also made of pa- per. Other pieces include a set of LYNTON GARDINER. meticulously costumed charae- ters from the commedia dell’arte, “Much of his life's work was devoted to studying an expres- siveness of human nature that you would never think could be elicited from a piece of paper” Ms. Gould said in an interview. Mr. Joisel, who had neither life partner nor children, is survived by four siblings. Eric Joisel was born in Eng- hien-les-Bains, near Paris, on TheNew York Cimes October 20, 2010 ERIC JOISEL AND ORIGAMI HOUSE. JAPAN Above, Eric Joisel recently with a meticulously costumed character from his commedia dell’arte series; left, a rooster; below, a mask he titled “Nick.” Nov. 15, 1956. As a young man he studied law and history before becoming a sculptor in clay, wood and stone. Then, in the early 1980s, he encountered the work of Akira Yoshizawa, the 20th-centu- ry Japanese master who was the first person to elevate origami to high-level figurative art. Mr. Joisel was enthralled by its expressiveness — and by the challenge of conjuring three-d mensional forms from two-di- mensional paper without adhe- sive or a single snip of the scissor. He threw all his earlier sculp- tures away. From the early "90s on, Mr. Joi- sel was a full-time origami maker, his art so labor intensive that de- spite the prices it commanded he led a markedly threadbare exist- ence. He lived alone by choice, in a modest farmhouse, where he spent hours each day designing, sketching and folding. “He's so wildly imaginative in a field which often suffers for lack of imagination,” ‘Ms. Gould said. “This is a man who lived in a house by himself and made crea- tures that came from the depths of his imagination.” Mr. Joisel often circulated pat- terns for his work, and to see one renders his art simultaneously approachable and unattainable. No lay person should even con- template the hedgehog. It is bare- ly possible, however, to make Mr. Joisel’s handsome rat, instruc- tions for which can be found at http://graphics8.nytimes .com/packages/pdf/arts /MoiselRat.pdf. Allone needs is a square of pa- per, infinite patience and an en- tire afternoon,