Le Corbusier

by Nicholas Fox Weber

  LE CORBUSIER’S warnings of false theatricality, however, were more warranted than anyone in the funeral audience could have imagined.

  The day before the ceremony, Malraux had telephoned a demand to the Indian ambassador to France, Rajeshwar Dayal: “You have to come with some water from the Ganges.” Dayal had replied that he didn’t have any, to which the culture minister responded, “Somebody at your embassy must have some.”24 When the ambassador arrived at the Cour Carrée with a silver vial allegedly containing water from the sacred river in the country where Le Corbusier had made his greatest work, the only people who knew it was merely Parisian tap water were the great orator and the Indian ambassador. When Le Corbusier had counseled Jacques Hindermeyer to boycott what the architect knew would be “a masquerade,” he had used the perfect word.

  3

  When André Malraux was done with his homily, drumrolls began from the honor guard. Delegates from all over the world heaped floral tributes on Le Corbusier’s casket. The man who had always admired soldiers in full uniform would have been pleased with the military parade that followed. Then the crowd, like a flood tide, forced its way past the police barriers and surrounded the stand on which the casket was resting, as if it were their last chance to approach a deity.

  The following day, Le Monde reported the details: “Toward midnight the coffin was placed in a hearse which, preceded by motorcycle escort, crossed sleeping Paris along the banks of the Seine.”25 Few in that honor guard would have known that they were passing the tiny attic apartment where Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, a young man just arrived from Switzerland fifty-eight years earlier, had regularly climbed eight flights of stairs. But all knew they were honoring someone who was credited with having changed the look of the world, if not always for the better.

  It was a stark contrast to Yvonne’s funeral eight years earlier. The handful of people in the Cour Carrée who were personally close enough to have been there noted the difference. Yvonne, to whom Le Corbusier had by then been married for nearly thirty years and with whom he had lived for the previous decade, had died on the day before the architect’s seventieth birthday. She had scarcely been known to the public at large. Le Corbusier, himself so visible, had always managed to keep his intimate side private.

  Some people said Le Corbusier had met Yvonne Gallis in a bordello, a rumor that the salty Mediterranean woman, her deep red lipstick painted in the form of a heart, did little to dispel. When Walter Gropius, the architect who had founded the Bauhaus, and his wife were dining in Le Corbusier’s apartment in the 1930s, Yvonne, after being silent through most of dinner, suddenly asked Gropius, “Have you seen it?” The ambiguous question puzzled Gropius, whose demeanor reflected his military training. She clarified: “Mon cul”—“my ass.”26 Twenty-five years later, when a young messenger boy went to the same apartment to deliver art supplies, she posed the identical question, again with a wink. It was her everyday line.

  The architects in Le Corbusier’s office knew that, whatever work was on the master’s agenda, he had to be home by 5:30 p.m. each day for the first pastis of the evening—his first one, anyway.27 When Le Corbusier was traveling, as was often the case, there were strict instructions for his young associates to phone Yvonne regularly and call on her frequently. If one was privileged enough to be invited to dinner, one knew that there were certain rules to follow in Yvonne’s presence. Work, or architecture in any aspect, was forbidden as a topic of conversation. The talk would mainly be gossip—Yvonne would report on the other inhabitants of the building.

  A former beauty, Yvonne had begun to look gaunt and dissipated in the 1940s. She used a cane and had a pronounced limp. But among Le Corbusier’s younger cohorts, who during the war generally got nothing more than the slim pickings of the cafeteria at architecture school, Yvonne’s cooking was legend, in particular her spicy aioli and other Mediterranean specialities.28

  Insiders knew that her situation was a tragedy that on some level must have torn her husband apart. Besides osteoporosis and gastritis, the primary cause of Yvonne’s health problems in the last years of her life was her severe alcoholism. Le Corbusier had always done his best to keep this problem, as well as her many other maladies and the rages as intense as her joking, secret from his friends. It was the reason he rarely attended openings, even of exhibitions of his own work. For years, Le Corbusier had taken her to the best doctors, but no one could persuade Yvonne to give up the bottle.

  Ever since the end of the war, Yvonne had been in the care of Jacques Hindermeyer. By that time, she was already noticeably debilitated. The reason was a complete loss of sensibility in the legs, a by-product of intense alcohol consumption.

  When he wasn’t denying or avoiding it, Le Corbusier partially blamed himself. The architect would often discuss the problem with Hindermeyer, the one person in whom he was comfortable confiding. He told the doctor how sorry he was not to have known earlier in the marriage that Yvonne was addicted to pastis. At the beginning, she rarely drank in front of him. She was by nature so funny and gay that he had failed to recognize her symptoms of drunkenness—or so he claimed. Now that he accepted that she was suffering from something other than the sort of nervous disorder that might be remedied by the right vitamin regime or another of the many solutions he had proffered when he thought there was hope, all that he tried to do was take care of her as best he could.

  On one occasion in the midfifties when Le Corbusier went to Baghdad for work and needed to go next to Chandigarh, he returned to Paris first. Hindermeyer asked him why he had not gone straight from Iraq to India. Le Corbusier replied that he could keep only one project in his head at a time and had to return to the office in between. Hindermeyer knew this was a cover-up; the truth was that Le Corbusier hated to leave Yvonne alone for long periods of time and always felt he had to look in on her. To the doctor, “his love for his wife, and his tenderness,” were unlike anything he had ever seen.

  Yvonne, late 1920s

  Sketch of a femur by Le Corbusier

  Yvonne by that time was so unhappy about the way she looked that she kept the apartment dark. “It was horrible for a man who had searched for sunlight his whole life to live in the dark,” his doctor observed.29 Then Yvonne developed a cancer of the anus. Hindermeyer proposed that she see a specialist who could treat her with radium. When the specialist told her to remove her clothes, she delivered a revised version of her famous line, but with none of the old coquetry. “You want me to show the world my ass?” she asked in a rage.30

  Yvonne often shouted obscenities and abused and humiliated her husband in front of anyone who happened to be present. Whatever toll he was paying inside, Le Corbusier responded to her wrath by smiling benevolently and caring for her patiently. At one point, Hindermeyer asked Le Corbusier why he never protested when Yvonne said insane things. He told the doctor, “I think only of my happy memories of our youth.”31

  THE DAY YVONNE DIED, Le Corbusier had his wife’s emaciated corpse brought home from the clinic and placed in a small room on the upper floor of the apartment. When Charlotte Perriand, his collaborator of many years, came to call, he took her to see it. “Look how lovely she is,” he said to his horrified visitor.32 He was convinced that Yvonne had the purest heart of anyone he knew.

  Yvonne’s modest rites took place in the crematorium of the prestigious Père Lachaise cemetery, on the other side of Paris from the apartment. Entering the august cemetery grounds, on their verdant hilltop overlooking the city, and following the road upward to the section for those whose bodies would be turned to ashes, Le Corbusier took in the eerie rows of temple-like stone mausoleums at the burying place of some of the most powerful families in France, as well as of Balzac and Proust and Oscar Wilde. His eye appraised the weighty pediments and ornate carving intended to house the dead for eternity. The crematorium chapel itself was everything Le Corbusier loathed in a building: a ponderous compendium of ill-matched historical references, with a scale that bore no relationship to ac
tual human beings. Only the rows of pines and the deciduous trees, whose leaves were showing the first tinge and withering of autumn, offered some connection with what he knew to be the reality and poetry of life.

  Just as Yvonne’s body slid from public view to be incinerated, Le Corbusier rose from the front row of the small chapel. Strong and fit, impeccably dressed in one of his well-tailored dark suits, he bolted forward and disappeared behind the curtain in front of the room. A moment later, the bereaved husband returned, holding a cone of newspaper. “This is all I have left of my dear Yvonne,” Le Corbusier exclaimed to Denise René, his long-time friend and gallerist, and Perriand. He had one of Yvonne’s bones in the rolled-up paper. Among his wife’s ashes, he had found “a tiny cervical vertebra” that was perfectly intact. Cremation in that period was not as thorough as it is now, and this bone, from the top of the neck, had remained.33 René and Perriand gripped one another’s hands in terror. “It was a hellish business, perfectly dreadful,” according to René, on whom the scene made such a gruesome impression that years later she maintained with absolute conviction that the bone had been one of Yvonne’s femurs.34

  Le Corbusier walked among the assembled group displaying this remainder of his wife. He continued to clutch it as he followed the urn containing Yvonne’s ashes. The vertebra had a gruesome truth to it that was totally lacking in the monumental neo-Classical and Renaissance-revival style of every surface and object in these oppressive surroundings. The architect took the bone back to his apartment on the rue Nungesser-et-Coli.35 For the rest of his life, he kept it in his pants pocket, like a talisman, occasionally placing it on his drafting table when he was working.

  “HE WAS A MAN who loved reality,” observed Jacques Hindermeyer, who often saw Le Corbusier touching the small vertebra. Clinging to his relic, he was rooting himself in a kernel of his wife’s existence, with which he could counteract the vagaries of his feelings.

  Le Corbusier’s own bones became relics as well. The day after the public ceremony in La Cour Carrée, the architect’s body was also cremated at Père Lachaise. Deliberately echoing what Le Corbusier had done following Yvonne’s death, his older brother, Albert, the only surviving blood relative, gathered up some of the bone fragments and distributed them. Robert Rebutato’s father, Albert himself, and other intimates always prized their small Plexiglas boxes of Le Corbusier’s remains. They were honored to possess the physical reality of someone whose personality and emotional character were so much harder to grasp.

  4

  The man whose coffin stood before the mob in La Cour Carrée had been preoccupied by death throughout his adult life. Le Corbusier viewed mortality as an integral part of the grand scheme of human existence, like the skulls that sit amid ripe lemons and velvety flowers in Cézanne’s still lifes. When the mother of one of the most important architects in Le Corbusier’s office, André Wogenscky, died, Le Corbusier had written a condolence letter that treated death as the key element of a building plan: “Death is the exit for each of us. I can’t see why it should be regarded as cruel and hideous. It is the horizontal of the vertical: complementary and natural.”36

  Le Corbusier was forty years old when his father died at age seventy-one. He remarked at the time, “I’m well aware now that one is born, grows up, creates, and dies. I am past the growing season. Beside Pierre [his cousin], who is dancing through his thirties, I’m already an old man, a producer certainly, though for some already a hoary traditionalist. One shinnies up one’s trajectory until—when?—it falls back to Earth?”37

  On the Monday morning the week after his father’s death at La Chauxde-Fonds, the mountain town where Le Corbusier had grown up, he wrote to his mother, “I often think of dear papa’s serene death, that winter Sunday so full of sunlight and so magnificently solemn. How pure papa’s image remains—so correct, so attached to things of the spirit. He always fixed his eyes on the horizon of an ideal, chimerical country.”38 Georges Jeanneret, an enameler of watch faces, had been a practical man, skillful of hand, but at the end he was above all a poet and spiritual voyager who had found tranquility.

  Another week after his father’s death, Le Corbusier wrote his mother again, this time about the death of one of his and Yvonne’s two pet parakeets: “Saturday. Yesterday we found Pilette lying quite peacefully in the middle of the nest. Pitou had been chirping for a whole day, terrified by this emptiness. Believe me, the death of a little bird has something quite mournful about it, awaking ideas related to other deaths, and the coldness of the little bird’s head was the same as the coldness of our dear Papa’s forehead.”39

  ON JANUARY 11, 1926, at 4:00 a.m., Le Corbusier made a drawing of his stone-cold father annotated in the manner of a death certificate. The open mouth and closed eyes on the gaunt head are almost unbearable to look at.

  Drawing of Georges-Edouard Jeanneret made on the night he died. The caption reads: “La nuit de sa mort. 11 janvier 1926 à 4 heures. Sa main gauche était toute gonflée.” {“The night of his death. January 11, 1926, at 4 a.m. His left hand was completely swollen.”}

  In 1957, he made four drawings of the dead Yvonne. They are like torrid images of the afterlife in a northern Renaissance depiction of the Last Judgment. The bonne vivante who had used lipstick to form her mouth like a movie star’s has no lips whatsoever; she has a lifeless slit sunk within a sharply concave face. Her nose is like the bony beak of a small bird. Her head is wrapped tightly in a bandage that seems to hold it together.

  The portrait Le Corbusier drew of his mother on February 15, 1960, just after she died at the age of ninety-nine and to which he attached a lock of her hair, is, if possible, even more horrific. The old woman’s head is thrown back as if it had snapped at the neck. Her tiny pointed chin juts forward. Le Corbusier did not dissemble about the ultimate destiny of the woman whose youthfulness he had exalted only a few days earlier. The truth had to be met squarely.

  II

  1

  Georges Edouard Jeanneret-Gris and Marie Charlotte Amélie Perret—both Swiss Calvinists, both natives of La Chaux-de-Fonds, a center of the watchmaking industry high in the Alps—were married in 1883. Their first son, Jacques-Henri Albert, was born February 6, 1886. Charles-Edouard came along twenty months later, on October 6, 1887. Marie was then twenty-seven, Georges thirty-two.

  Jeanneret-Gris’s meticulous journal reported that, once his wife’s “labor pains announced the imminent arrival of the expected child,” he “went back to work.” The doctor “anticipated the birth would be at 9 o’clock in the evening. As 9 sounded, the child was there…. All went well, he was put immediately on cows’ milk and he drinks his bottle like a man.”1

  Some five years later, Marie miscarried; she bore no further children. The mother and father and two boys were a close-knit unit. Their disputes as well as the siblings’ rivalry were often intense, but the importance of the core family to each of its members never wavered.

  The family lived at 38 rue de la Serre, a few blocks from the main thoroughfare of La Chaux-de-Fonds. It was an unprepossessing apartment in a nondescript five-story structure of reddish-brown stone, pressed against similarly monotonous buildings. The city, in spite of its location, had no Alpine charm. Relentlessly grim, it was composed on a regular grid, with street after street of blank-faced building facades climbing its tedious slopes. Having been destroyed by a fire in 1794, La Chaux-de-Fonds was rebuilt in the nineteenth century in a taciturn architectural style. Laid out as if with a watchmaker’s tools, its sad and weighty rows of shops and apartment houses had none of the magic or complexity of clockworks, only their precision and insistent order. In 1910, when he was twenty-three years old and imagining his return to his natal city while working in Berlin, Charles-Edouard Jeanneret wrote William Ritter, “La Chaux-de-Fonds is indeed a leprous place. You found the right term for this incoherent agglomeration of eyesores. Yet through it blows a wind of living idealism which is quite remarkable and fills you with hope…. Since the old farms of the 18th c
entury, there has been no art tradition.”2 The next year, having returned home, he told Ritter, “But I feel I’m a stranger here, and I still can’t get it through my head that I would always feel that way.”3 On the back side of an envelope, he noted his birthplace as “La Chaux-de-Fonds of shit.”4 After another year had passed, he wrote Ritter: “I’ve already told you how agonizing I find the notion of ending my days here.”5

  Charles-Edouard Jeanneret (on pedestal) with his family, taken two months after his second birthday (December 1889)

  Later in his life as his own propaganda machine, Le Corbusier insistently presented his birthplace as a rich wellspring. Determined that his youth and education be seen as a progression of successes in a well-organized milieu, he summarized a childhood in which he took to the mountains to study the workings of nature, applied pencil and watercolor to paper with the genius of a prodigy, and acquired the education necessary to make buildings and plan cities of unprecedented harmoniousness. He let it be known that his father instructed him about plant life and birds and led him on rigorous hikes, and that his mother taught him music. But he carefully cast aside his Swissness.

  When World War II was raging and Le Corbusier had spare time because of a lull in his practice, he collaborated with Maximilien Gauthier on a mid-career biography, Le Corbusier; or, Architecture in the Service of Mankind.6 Hitler had given unprecedented significance to national identity and genetic heritage, an emphasis supported by France’s leadership in Vichy. While the first sentence of Gauthier’s book gives Charles-Edouard Jeanneret’s place of birth as La Chaux-de-Fonds, it leaves out that this is in Switzerland, while stating that Le Corbusier was “naturalized French in 1930, or rather reintegrated within French nationality.”7 In 1964, in Corbusier Himself, the architect amplifies his French roots. He explains that in about 1350, the French of the north massacred the French of the south because the southerners held libertarian ideas about various points of religious doctrine; some of these southern rebels fled to the mountains of Neuchâtel, then primarily inhabited by wolves. Le Corbusier’s ancestors were among the French rebels. “Why these indications of origins?” asks the book. “In a spirit of honesty, to help others understand the rationale of the movement of ideas. Le Corbusier is not ‘Schweiz.’”8