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46
Amâncio Guedes1. Purism is the least known of modern move-
The Paintings and Sculptures of
Le Corbusier

They believed that man is a geometrical animal, animated

ments. It is not one of those now popular movements you can by a geometric spirit, that machines are the solution to given
find on the shelves of Exclusive Books in paperback - a whole pro-blems, lessons of method, and that technical realization is
instant movement for around R30. Yet architecturally Purism no-thing more than a vigorous materialization of the concept.
was the most influential of all modern movements. It shaped the They set out to revitalize the original geometric basis of Cubism
definitive image of the 'International Style' through the work of which they accused of having degenerated into another decora-
Le Corbusier. There was a strong dependence of much early tive and tired style.
modern architecture on painting. Cubism, Constructivism, De In September 1918 Ozenfant and Jeanneret met at
Stijl and Purism were all instrumental in the creation of the va- Andernos and there they wrote Après le Cubisme (Beyond
rious currents of modern architecture. Many of the architects Cubism). Of all the avant-garde manifestos Après le Cubisme
were also painters or had close friendships with painters. De was both more polemical and more old-fashioned in its views.
Stijl was the movement in which painting and architecture come The introductory quotation from Voltaire set the mood:
closest to each other, but perhaps because of that very literal "Decadence is produced by facility in making and by laziness in
similarity it spent all its vitality in one wonderful building: making well, by the satiety with beauty and the taste for the
Rietveld's Schroder House. The dependence of Le Corbusier's bizarre". Après le Cubisme was launched simultaneously with
seminal ideal villas, Ozenfant, La Roche-Jeanneret, Cook, the opening of their exhibition in the Gallery Thomas towards
Guiette, Cannile, Garches and Savoye on his own Purist pain- the end of 1918. Jeanneret exhibited only two paintings,
tings is of another order; it is of a complex and poetic nature. Ozenfant a far larger number. The works shown were illusionis-
When Jeanneret met Ozenfant he was already a painter and tic and formal. Ozenfant was taken for the leader. Following the
a critic with an established reputation. He had edited an avant- exhibition the two friends became inseparable and dedicated
garde magazine, L'Elan, and owned a small fashion shop. themselves intensely to painting. They worked together in
Jeanneret's relation with Ozenfant, at first, was that of a disciple. Ozenfant's studio. His comment on their collaboration already
To his mentor he wrote: "Of those I know you are the one who hints at future difficulties between them: "It was truly joint labour:
seems to be carrying out most clearly what is stirring within me" I sounded the tone and he was the echo that occasionally rein-
and "In my confusion I try to evoke your tranquil, sensitive, clear forced it". Their science of art led to mechanization of method.
will. I feel that I am at the threshold of discoveries, while you The two purists composed their paintings from the shapes of
are concerned with their realization". These, and other out- everyday objects such as bottles, pipes, glasses and musical
pourings were, no doubt, to cause Le Corbusier excruciating instruments. For them, these objects had reached an anony-
embarrassment later. mous sort of standardized purity in their simple shapes which
Purism was an avant-garde movement only in the broadest coincided with purist aspirations for an industrial art. They
sense. Its position was idealistic and restorative. It glorified assembled their paintings not only out of standardized objects
order, logic, culture and technological progress. Purism was but out of standardized pictorial parts, as if in creative mimicry
seen by its founders as the successor to both Cubism and of mass production. These industrial qualities - planning and
Dadaism. They claimed to be constructive where Dada was just standardization - apply to their work throughout the lifespan of
negative, and vigorously intellectual where Cubism had become the movement. So carefully are such paintings planned that
decorative. The Purists claimed that a work of art should pro- their flat surfaces of colour rise in low plateaux of paint, bor-
voke a sensation of mathematical order and the means by which dered by ridges or valleys, the result of a laborious and long
this order is achieved should be sought in universal means. process of filling and adjusting colours in clearly mapped out

–1 Published in Architecture SA / Argitektuur SA (Johannesburg), Jannuary-February 1988.

1 Le bol rouge, 1919, oil on canvas.
2 Nature morte à l’œuf, 1919, oil on canvas.
3 Guitare verticale, 1920, oil on canvas
4 Nature morte à la pile d’assiettes et au livre, 1920
5 Nature morte à la pile d’assiettes, 1920

1 2 3

4 5

areas. Behind these paintings lie drawings as precise and as fi- persistent English title). Ozenfant later claimed that Vers une
nished as the paintings themselves. Their pictures no longer Architecture was made up of articles that they had co-authored
evolved on the canvas as they had before the war with the cubist for their magazine, but from the later publications of both it is
painters. The process of painting had become the process of obvious that Jeanneret-Le Corbusier was by far the major con-
manufacturing an idea defined almost down to the last detail. In tributor. By then it must have seemed clear to contemporaries
this it was like the process through which architects realize their that the Ozenfant and Jeanneret friendship was foundering.
ideas. Jeanneret had committed the most unforgivable of crimes. He
In 1920 they launched a monthly publication L'Esprit had painted more significant and intensely personal paintings
Nouveau (The New Spirit) which was dedicated to "L'esthétique than his mentor and he had become a notorious architect with a
de la vie moderne". Its first issue appeared in October and it ran clientele and a following. The opportunity for a decisive break in
to a total of 28 issues. The first number proclaimed L'Esprit the relationship arose in an argument over the hanging of the
Nouveau as the first magazine in the world truly dedicated to paintings in Maison La Roche.
living aesthetics. Articles by various well-known contributors Jeanneret exhibited often during the hey-day of Purism. In
dealt with the work of Picasso, De Stijl, Loos, poetry, psycholo- January 1921 he showed his paintings at the Druet Gallery (figs.
gy, etc. 2, 3). One of those pictures (his seventh painting) is now in the
In 1922-23 Jeanneret designed and built the Ozenfant Museum of Modern Art in New York. It is the “Nature morte a la
Studio House. It is the most pure of all the architectural equiva- pile d'assiettes et au livre”, in brown, pink, oranges, greys and
lents of their purist paintings. The house is also a shallow box blues (fig. 3). Another painting with an almost identical composi-
containing various levels, volumes and simple geometric ele- tion is the green “Nature morte a la pile d'assiettes” of 1920,
ments within the frame of its boundary walls. The whole of the which was in the Raoul La Roche collection and is now in the
composition converges on the 'cube of light' of the studio, which Kunstmuseum at Basel. I have recently completed a full-size
is the architectural equivalent of the cube in “Le bol rouge” of copy of this
1919 (fig. 1). The two spiral stairs, one internal, one external, are painting from a reproduction in a catalogue. I learnt more about
like the up-right cylindrical bottles in the paintings. Jeanneret's Purism from drawing and painting this beautiful and
Various separate articles on Architecture which had absurd machine than from everything else I have read and
appeared in some of the issues of L'Esprit Nouveau under the looked at.
name of Corbusier-Saugnier (Corbusier being Jeanneret's pseu- In 1922 he exhibited his first large picture at the Indepen-
donym and Saugnier Ozenfant's) were in 1923 rewritten and dents (fig. 5); it was followed by a second large picture in 1923
edited by Jeanneret into what was to become his most famous and an extensive exhibition at the Galerie de l'Effort Moderne.
book Vers une Architecture (Towards an Architecture and not its

251
6 7 8

Le Corbusier was later to write in his biographical note of by 1928 the still lifes are puzzles of fragments of objects which
1948: flow into each other and generate linear and flickering move-
For seven years I was able to give only Saturday afternoons ments within the paintings.
and Sundays to painting, each week throughout the year. By 1928 and simultaneously with the variations of Purist still
For twenty-five years I have painted every Sunday, and that lifes (fig. 9) which he was to do throughout the rest of his life, he
whole day-of-painting adds up. Then later, until the war I was paints “La dame au chal et à la théière” (fig. 10) and “La femme
able to paint every morning from eight to one. In 1933 I au guèridon et au fer à cheval” (fig. 11) using the same device
decided to have no further public exhibitions of my pictures. of alternating three-dimensional fragments with areas of flat
A heated controversy was going on about Vers une Archi- paint which are typical of the earlier still lifes. These works are
tecture, my first book which has just appeared, and about my the beginning of a new kind of painting for Le Corbusier which
campaign in L'Esprit Nouveau which was dedicated to archi- have the female figure as a theme. It was lo become another
tecture and urbanism. I signed my paintings: Jeanneret; my recurring subject for him. The paintings are carefully executed
architecture: Le Corbusier. Those were years of extreme and incorporate many of the devices learned from Purism. The
intensity during which, with very simple themes (the La drawings on the other hand, gouaches and water-colours are
Roche house and other houses, or bottles and glasses on mostly intensely agita-ted. Some of these works found their way
canvasses), I tried passionately to find certitudes. to South Africa before the war.
A painter who does architecture!... They are the coloured drawing (fig. 12) he gave to
An architect who paints!... Martienssen and which he reproduces quite inappropriately as
The mind of an engineer!... the frontispiece to “The Abstract Art Congress” in the South
Poet (as an insult)...artist!... African Architectural Record of July 1937, and the gouache and
And from the first: "Bolshevik!"... the collage of recumbent women and the oil "Trois femmes
And since 1933 "Fascist" or "Communist" according to taste. assises" in the Fassler Collection. This painting forms part of the
Le Corbusier's villas of the 1920s were spatially organised with sequence of drawings, gouaches and coIlages (fig. 13) which
all the perfection of his contemporary paintings. Their facades resulted in “Sous les pilotis”, the graffiti mural of 1939 in the
and spaces were ordered and checked by geometrical devices Eileen Gray and Jean Badovici Villa at Cap Martin. It is the only
closely related to the theories of Renaissance architects and mural of Le Corbusier where he did not 'destroy' the wall but
identical with those he had used to verify his preparatory enriched it with fluid and flowing lines representing three super-
drawings for his paintings. The curved solarium walls, the imposed women.
swinging or skewed internal partitions, the spiral stairs and In the Fassler oil the linear definition of the figures is inde-
ramps of these villas are of the same family as the outlines of pendent of the blobs of colour. The blobs are like those on the
the rotund objects depicted in the paintings and the smooth, flat site plans of the Centrosoyuz, the Palace of Soviets, the plan
plastered walls have the evenness of the painted surfaces in the Obus for Algiers which was later to materialize into the double
pictures. The pastel shades and browns of the villas are those studio wings of the Carpenter Center at Harvard, the captive soft
of the paintings. His early buildings evoke machinery in a mad volumes within the Mill-Owners Association building; and these
way; they are indeed 'machines à émuvoir', machines whose 'blobs' return to his painting in the”'Taureaux” (fig. 14) and
purpose it is to move us, which he had defined as the real pur- “Icônes”.(fig. 15) The Fasslers have a few letters from Le
pose of architecture in Towards an Architecture. "The purpose Corbusier about a misunderstanding by Martienssen over the
of construction is to make things hold together; of architecture to cost of the painting when he chose the work in Paris and a
move us." In his later Purist paintings, the “Natures mortes aux description with sketches of how Le Corbusier wished the paint-
nombreux objets” (figs. 7, 8), the objects multiply and the con- ing to be framed. In New World of Space, Le Corbusier
tours fuse in a glowing brightness of plans and elevations until describes his invention of such frames:
GUEDES, PAINTINGS & SCULPTURES OF L-C

6 Nature morte pâle à la lanterne, 1922, oil on canvas.

7 Étude pour la Nature morte du pavillon de l’Esprit Nouveau, 1925, water colour
on paper.
8 Nature morte avec plusieurs objets, 1925, oil on canvas.
9 Composition avec la lune, 1929, oil on canvas.
10 La dame au chat et à la théïère, 1928, oil on canvas.
11 La femme au guéridon et au fer à cheval, 1929, oil on canvas.
12 Deux femmes, 1926, pen, ink and water colour on paper.
13 Personnages assis, 1937, collage and gouache on paper.
14 Taureau II, 1929-1953, oil on canvas.
15 Icône III, 1956, oil on canvas.
16 Le bûcheron, 1931, oil on canvas.
17 Femme couchée, cordage et bateau à la porte verte, 1935, oil on canvas.

10

9 11

13
12

14

15 16 17

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18 19 20

For a long time picture frames caused me the most painful woman's body which is shaded into relief move the eye sepa-
distress. Some said 'Frames are useless'; others liked to rately over different areas of the painting that are contained by
surround the most daring modern pictures with old carved a number of squared elements, just as the roads and row-hous-
and patinaed Italian and Spanish frames, (obviously, the ing at Durand scheme meander towards the stepped apart-
pseudo-daring did likewise!). I noticed first of all that frame- ments’ stoppages. And is not the prow of the boat in the paint-
makers never hesitated to cover a half inch or more of the ing a premonition of Ronchamp?
edge of the picture. In general painters are not bothered by When the war came and France was defeated and occupied
that; they don't notice it. Finally in 1938 I hit on a frame which by the Nazis he isolated himself in the Pyrenees and drew and
is flush with the canvas, it is made of two-by-two inch wood painted strange presences which he later names “Ubus”. Le
and the canvas slips in from the front and becomes encased. Corbusier himself relates how these works and the “Ozons”
As a result, the edges of the canvas are exposed. Thus, the became sculptures:
exact mathematical or geometric relations may be apprecia- A Breton cabinet-maker who did not know that he was a
ted, as they are no longer falsified or distorted by the frame- sculptor has carved panels of wood after pictures of mine. I
maker. had not noticed that my pictures were 'sculptable', which is
An influence on Le Corbusier's painting during the 1930's is that probably the cruelest judgment that can be made of them. It
of his friend, the painter Fernand Léger, whom he had known is true that I always try to achieve full volume in an unlimited
and admired since his arrival in Paris. This influence is however perspective. My painting can become polychrome sculpture.
more in terms of subject matter, the "objets a réaction poétique" Colour brings life into sculpture and architecture. It is possi-
and women, than in actual pictorial terms. Behind both painters, ble to carve a picture. Is this the confusion of methods, the
however, there is the influence of Surrealism, the most dis- verdict without appeal? I have no a priori judgment: when a
turbing and intense art movement of the time. thing is beautiful, it is beautiful!
Some of the works of this period, such as “Le boucheron” The idea of making sculptures out of Le Corbusier's drawings
(fig. 16) of 1931 which contains a suspected self-portrait, timber and paintings came from Joseph Savina, a wood carver who
logs and wood cutter's tools, were deliberately connected to the produced his first sculpture from a Le Corbusier drawing in 1946
Errazuris House designed during 1930 by Le Corbusier on a and from then on collaborated with him until his death in 1965.
page of New World of Space with two tiny intermediary photo- For the first five years Savina worked on his own from drawings,
graphs of cut logs. The “Femme couchée, cordage et bateau a reproductions and written instructions, but after 1951 Savina
la porte ouverte” (fig. 17) of 1933 is the contemporary of the often made full size working drawings to avoid misunder-
Durand Apartments project with the meandering row-housing standings, although he sometimes took the initiative and inven-
and roads. The rope painted flat and the complex out line of the ted his own interpretations. The sculptures group themselves in
GUEDES, PAINTINGS & SCULPTURES OF L-C

18 Ozon opus I, 1947, painted wood.

19 Ubul, 1947, wood.
20 Totem, 1950, pen, wood and iron.

different series, Ozons (fig. 18), Ubus (fig. 19), Femmes, Totems also in the design of cartoons for tapestries which he called the
(fig. 20), Panurges etc. They consist of a base upon which a "nomad's murals"; and in the sketches for huge enamel panels
number of differentiated pieces are assembled. Most of the early such as those which make up the doors at Ronchamp and
pieces have a marked frontality, with areas of low relief alternat- Chandigarh.
ing with well rounded carving. Many of the pieces are coloured, Soon after the war, during his stay in the United States for
partially coloured or stained, the areas of bright colour or white the setting up of the United Nations project, he often stayed with
contradicting and flattening the volumes. Sometimes the sepa- Nivola, a young Italian American sculptor who had developed a
rate and indefinable objects which make up what at first glance technique of casting plaster panels onto wet sand moulds. Le
appear to be a still life are connected by extraneous bits of flat Corbusier experimented with Nivola in the casting of some of his
metal and are held together by bolts and nuts. They often have own pieces arid painted murals on the walls of the modest
the promise of movement or at least reassembly. They are a beach cottage of the Nivolas. This manner of realising his ideas
strange collection of private symbols and personal signs which is much the same as the one he had decided upon earlier for the
Le Corbusier commented on as follows: execution of his architectural work. He surrounded himself with
On reflection I think that all this means one thing. It is a ques- assistants so that he could distance himself from the actual
tion of a work of art, that is, of a will to reveal and to seize working out of the details and retain the intensity of the concept.
the emotion in relationships. These relationships are deter- One dominant concern of architects and artists after the war
mined by precise facts like exact words, put together in was the "Synthesis of the arts", and there was much publishing
accordance with the kind of logic which is precisely the real- and positive criticism about this which took the form of collabo-
ity of art. It is obvious that these precise facts, words or ration among architects and artists where each kept to their cir-
objects, are within grasp; if they are grasped clearly, a cer- cumscribed areas. Outstanding examples of this were the
tain quality of spirit in the artist is shown. They are facts glazed tile wall decoration and Lipschitz'Prometheus at the
which are painted or built. They evoke relationships as sub- Ministry of Education in Rio and the azulejo murals by Portinari
tle, on occasion, as the most winged verses. Why not? If the in the Pampulha Chapel of Niemeyer. Le Corbusier was the only
hand can seize them or move freely among the secrets of one who could conceive of that synthesis by himself through his
their interlacing, it is because they are conceived, willed and unique way of collaborating with assistants and craftsmen. In
executed with firmness and with truth. And perhaps with sub- this he had succeeded in returning lo the age-old tradition of the
tle overtones. Then it is UBU, polychrome sculpture in which master artist who worked in his 'bodegga' surrounded by disci-
there are hints of landscape, of lagoons or beaches, or other ples and assistants.
things. It is also a house or a large building raised up on
posts; it is a city lifting up in the sky of its future the spheres,
cones and cylinders, arranged in a certain order, of a Saint- Amâncio Guedes. See his biographical note on article num-
Gaudens, of Barcelona, of Algiers or of Paris, or of Rio de ber 45 of this publication: Isabel Maria Rodrigues, "Vers
Janeiro. une promenade architecturale: Le Corbusier - Martienssen
His painting after the war was hamperd by the many architec- - Guedes, O Leão que Ri - Team 10"
tural commissions he undertook. A part from the Taureau and
Icône series he repainted earlier works, made new variations
and carried on doing small oil sketches where he managed to
capture the vitality of his drawings which eluded him in the lar-
ger works.
The opportunity to work creatively with other craftsmen and
artists was explored not only in the collaboration with Savina but
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