Le Corbusier

by Nicholas Fox Weber

  In this ideal residence, water would be everywhere. There would be a pool made of smooth marble and a tiled basin receiving the flow would emerge through six tiled channels in a niche on one side of the courtyard. “In the vestibule, almost all the reliefs are engraved in the mold, in the fashion of old Greek, Byzantine, Sassanian, and Etruscan coins.”10 This exotic vision of home conjured in 1915 has a luxuriance that, however concealed, underlay Le Corbusier’s most machined buildings.

  EARLY IN JUNE, Jeanneret went to the south of France to meet Auguste Perret. The first leg of the journey was a train from La Chaux-de-Fonds to Lausanne. Before boarding, a stranger approached and asked Jeanneret to take charge of a teenage girl taking the same trip. “I was introduced to her and then I was requested to be sure nothing happened to her,” he later wrote.

  He was bowled over by the adolescent’s beauty: “I saw her for the first time, and perhaps for the first time as well I the solitary and hitherto unlikely connoisseur of women, found a depth, a tranquility, deep and distinctly apparent, a wealth of impressions leaping from the heart as well as from the lovely lips, charms as in a pretty round face, smooth and well-proportioned, and in gray eyes rimmed with ochre, clear and straightforward, all of the qualities which are not those of a doll but of a woman of ravishing sensibilities.”11

  Changing trains with his temporary ward in Lausanne, he witnessed a heartbreaking scene on the platform that both saddened him and awakened his voyeurism. A woman had accompanied her fiancé, a soldier, from Geneva to Lausanne, where he was being mobilized to Italy: “They were pressed close together against each other on the step of the railroad car, their faces constantly united, seizing, sucking, drinking each other, drenched with the young girl’s slow tears. And long, sudden hugs, like bedroom recollections. Broken apart, having continued, having certainly given the totality of gifts in this last afternoon of the first stifling summer day, having pressed against each other with all their skin, with all their strength, in alternating anguish and delight, and the hideous suggestions of possible outcomes. The mother of the mobilized soldier was eagerly watching this supreme expression of her son’s heart, whose last moments she reserved for herself. The train left. The girl beside me was weeping gently. I dared not look at her; I registered the faint sound of her tears. Bellegarde. Culloz. So many other tiny stations where the train kept stopping. Staring at people and weighing the silences, the smiles, and that friendliness of men over forty which one sees so much of everywhere, and then at each stop, seeing getting into the train not even accompanied, without embraces, without anything, one, two, five soldiers with red trousers. I was quite overcome. At each station, my nerves were at the edge of my eyelids. One of those famous artillerymen, a chasseur alpin! Very masculine, short, but tough and nervous. And all with such gentle expressions. Ambérieux. ‘For the wounded’: this young woman is selling short-stemmed roses, I walk off with mine, hide myself in my compartment, remembering those fragments of sentences I feel it necessary to write, for this is a unique year, and each episode of this country’s history is like a temple corridor or gallery to me. The day before yesterday, I was telling the young Jewess about my desire for action and the cravings, which sometimes grew so intense to fight as well as the others. I am timid here, feeling so useless I only dare glance at them out of the corner of my eye, these poilus who are going back to the front—these poilus, fresh, clean shaven, well brushed, quite short: not husbands, not fathers, but mama’s boys. That rose for the wounded I had bought is quite pale and not the royal flower of the lips. Its perfume is scarcely apparent, something like a big eglantine. The train pulls out.”12

  The “young Jewess” to whom he was referring was the girlfriend of his friend Charles Auguste Humbert. She was another of his friends’ girlfriends who obsessed him while he still did not have one of his own: “with black hair, blue eyes, heavy eyelids, matte-white skin, she would make a wonderful seraglio odalisque, and were it not for La Chaux, I would declare myself the Sultan!”13

  Continuing on his journey, Charles-Edouard Jeanneret became increasingly devastated by the wounded soldiers, young wives in mourning, and military men armed for battle. With his penchant for good machinery, he admired the weaponry—“The first bayonet. A terrible device at the end of a rifle. Long, black, splendidly sleeved”—but even if he respected the mechanism, he was shattered by its significance. “The afternoon Lyon–Marseille express, dear friend, is the train of women in mourning. Black crepe in almost every compartment. In the streets of Lyon, life was so normal that I returned to the station, curious about what had come over me this morning and annoyed with myself for still being a man of pathos, of immediate sensations, of indiscreet emotions. The train full of these women in mourning brought it all back.”14

  FACED WITH the human suffering wrought by the war, Jeanneret was anguished by Swiss neutrality and his own distance from the action he was witnessing in France but had essentially ignored at home. He lamented “a lack of awareness for which I cannot forgive myself. For after all, this country is at war, and it’s been nine months now that I’ve imagined these horrors…. No one talks about it. Up till now, there’s been no sign of a black soldier, a Gurka, nor a cannon. Now the train is full of soldiers. We share a car with officers. All quite clean and calm, very calm. They’re about to do their fortnight in barracks! Is that what war is?”15

  As the train wound its way south, and he scribbled away at this twenty-eight-page letter to William Ritter, Jeanneret’s flickering mind jumped from the human drama to the changing landscape outside the train window:

  Here we have it! Classical lands! It begins before Orange, with ruins clinging to an ochre pinnacle; there was a stone church with a tiny germinated window; there were whole mountains covered with glistening gorse, the first olive trees, the cypresses, and since the sky is full of melting clouds, it is van Gogh before Cézanne. Then, to the left, the last Alps, strangely silhouetted like cumulus clouds in a stormy sky on a stage set of the Vieux Colombier. Then: the gray walls, the pink earth, the gray olive trees, and all of a sudden, as a kind of hors-d’oeuvre, a huge bed of the most radiant pink and blue foxgloves….

  But back to van Gogh. Under the steely sky, the writhing cypresses; the gamut of the intensest emerald: green-green-green, no black, no red; yes, one red roof…. Then van Gogh, the drawings…: wheat fields, oats, vineyards, olive trees, fruit trees, vegetables in geometric patches….

  Cézanne will not be at the party today. The “motif” is not here. It’s true, Monsieur Cézanne does not do “skies with pale gray mixed into the blue,” so today there will be no painting the earth of Provence, whose soul belongs to a man of the north, his pathetic passion so imperiously interposed between us.16

  Even as he failed to make sense, the power of color on his brain and his fascination with the vision of great and radical artists was clear. He then noted the saline and eucalyptus smells in the air. Recalling a large bouquet of anemones he had arranged the day before, he launched into a diatribe against geraniums and a commentary on the sweet smell of roses in the warm air, which led him to memories of Mount Athos. “The flora, the sensation, the smell, the evocation of the mornings on Mount Athos where the sea, as here, was always present, but larger because we were seeing it from higher up, but paler and more intoxicating because the season was August instead of June. And because we had the recollection of having seen the islands as red, while they are green, and because we were after all in Greece itself, while here it is only Magna Graecia.”17

  Then, at long last, the train brought Jeanneret—and, we presume, the teenage girl of whom he had taken charge—to the Mediterranean port that ultimately was one of the most important places in his life: “A stir and a rising of the waves in sparkling sheaves, a spreading apostrophe. Marseille! Marseille!”18

  5

  Jeanneret’s reunion with Auguste Perret in the salubrious setting of Provence made him burst with joy. They talked animatedly about Paris and the new ways of seeing
that were being promulgated there. The reborn Jeanneret reversed himself about Cubism. Previously he had disparaged the artistic movement recently launched by Braque and Picasso; now he was at home with its multiple ways of seeing at once: “Let’s hear it for cubists: let’s understand everything the world offers by way of ‘fantasy,’ ‘evocation,’ ‘spirit,’ and everything the world has to offer aside from photography and banality and ready-made vision.”19

  Jeanneret wrote Ritter that he greatly admired Perret’s Théâtre des Champs-Elysées and regretted not having been able to accept his former boss’s invitation to return to Paris and work on it: “As far as I’m concerned, it’s the best piece of architecture in a long time. Auguste Perret has no diploma, he tells me. His thoughts are permanently molded, like reinforced concrete.”20 Here was a role model to replace L’Eplattenier. Modern technique, steadfast resolve, no official credentials: these were the ingredients of genius.

  The halcyon setting lent magic to their reunion: “But Marseille, gateway to the east!…A city of life, swarming life…. A city of fortresses and a city of peoples. The empire reigns at the gates of the port, and the empire is all of Europe. The Hotel de Ville is at the very least the Great Khan, China, and the Indies. It is the port of masks, the sea glimpsed beyond the forts, a second Attica, Magna Graecia…. A port, but what a port! Negroes, ships, waves, fish with fantastic scales, shellfish, masked crowds, Chinamen, Gurkas, and Kamerat!”21 The love affair with that exotic seaside city was, after yet another world war, to culminate in one of Le Corbusier’s masterpieces.

  6

  Back in La Chaux-de-Fonds, the twenty-seven-year-old worked on a series of interiors where the lacquered inlay and other bows to tradition came to represent “corruption of the most banal sort and the most vulgar.”22 Then, in August, he returned to Paris.

  As usual, his mind was full of contradictions. He wrote Ritter, “What a paradox this war is, this mass uprising. Yet only man is so rich a marvel that he includes all consolations. Paris, a harmonious city. This war has destroyed the old sense of greatness. It is very harmonious here. But the city, all cities prove to me that we are living on conventions: the convention of an old and absurdly idiotic abode.”23

  Humankind appalled him: “But the contortions, the grimaces of Paris! If you saw the faces here, the whole greedy and insane swarm, the cruel egoism: life as a funnel down which one slides to the depths.”24 Yet the French, compared to the Germans, gave him cause for hope: “there are many flagrant proofs of this people’s charming and serious ingenuity—much more profound than across the Rhine—which frequently exalts me and gives me the courage to follow my star.”25 Even in his rage and confusion, Jeanneret’s exaltation and inner strength were returning as he zeroed in on the idea that that star was to make cities that were “explicitly modern.”26

  XI

  1

  He did not wish to lose any time in putting his plan into effect, for he could not but blame himself for what the world was losing by his delay, so many were the wrongs that were to be righted, the grievances to be redressed, the abuses to be done away with, and the duties to be performed.

  —CERVANTES, Don Quixote

  In Paris, Jeanneret stayed with Max Du Bois. In the course of the visit, he met Aristide Maillol, considered the greatest sculptor alive. In that first encounter, Maillol was making a stone wall. If Jeanneret’s account can be trusted, the sculptor praised Jeanneret’s architecture, although he could have known it only from hearsay or drawings or a few photos, since nothing had as yet been published. Jeanneret began to dream of making a building for Maillol’s work.

  Aristide Joseph Bonaventure Maillol was Jeanneret’s senior by twenty-six years. He was the colorful sort of character who would, life long, appeal to Le Corbusier. Born on a farm near the small port of Banyuls-sur-Mer, Maillol had grown up admiring a smuggler grandfather, had been expelled from boarding school, and—after showing his work to Jean-Léon Gérôme, a Beaux-Arts academician, and being told he knew nothing whatsoever—had jumped at the chance to make art in his own way.

  After war broke out in 1914, Maillol had buried his statues to protect them against enemy bombs. That act led to Maillol’s being accused of spying for the enemy. A public prosecutor issued a search warrant to try to find grounds for arresting Maillol for treason, and, although the investigating judges dismissed the charges, a mob burned Maillol’s workshop.

  When Jeanneret met Maillol, he felt immediate sympathy for someone he considered, like himself, society’s victim. And he admired Maillol’s robust, overtly sensual sculptures, which were like spirited fertility symbols.

  On the second and third of August, Jeanneret stayed at Maillol’s house in Marly-le-Roy, not far from Versailles. It was the setting of a great sexual awakening. The sculptor himself was not, however, present. Jeanneret wrote up what occurred in an account full of literary flourishes that he sent to William Ritter. Titled “Grandeur et Servitude…,” it began, “There stands the house that Maillol built the year before the war. He did everything himself: plans, financing, supervision, employees: 15,000 Swiss francs is a lot for such mean walls, and the house is little more than a shed but so agreeably arranged. Untrained architects always have a verve of their own, and it’s good Maillol didn’t seek professional help.”1

  The visitor from La Chaux-de-Fonds admired the carefully chosen mixture of the ancient and modern objects: “In the large room downstairs was an old, Flemish (?) tapestry on the wall: a wonderful effect, something like Bonnard, something like Gauguin.” Jeanneret responded viscerally to the sculpture—“one of those powerful figures by Phidias at the Parthenon”—and Maillol’s plaster for “‘Pomona’…with her apples in her hands, the tits even more beautiful as fruits go, her huge thighs.” This voluptuous piece and the woman who had modeled for it were his ideal type: “A Spanish woman from Banyuls, actually more powerful than that, with a chest out to here! Well, really something. The Pomona, still in plaster, was lying on the ground, maybe two-thirds life size: amazing.” There was also an “admirable Gauguin, perfectly hung near the big glassed-in area (the former studio) where the fig tree outside presses its leaves against the panes, creating a green undersea atmosphere where the green Gauguin seascape of waves filling the whole frame sings as it rises up the long pink snake of beach.”2

  Unbridled colors, the moving evocation of the sea, the glories of nature: again Charles-Edouard Jeanneret’s eyes were opened.

  HAVING SET the scene, Jeanneret introduces one of its key players. He is Gaston Béguin, from Locle, one town away from La Chaux-de-Fonds, to whom Jeanneret gives a Latin-style Rabelaisian name: “Gastonibus Béguinus, a Calvinist Swiss, from Locle, models a bust of Jeanne, Maillol’s niece. Soon she looks like a frog, so strongly are the planes, spheres, prisms, etc. brought out; a tin frog made by a roofer. Was this the influence of cubism? Indeed, Maillol might have reason to complain when he comes back from Banyuls.”3

  Jeanneret then interrupts his account of Béguin at work to extol the charms of Maillol’s own oversized, well-endowed nudes. These sculptures, with their capacious bosoms and ample hips, exemplified a Mediterranean sense of pleasure he found irresistible. “This is certainly the Olympus of monumental, earth-mother buttocks, the breasts that fill your hand.” The Pomona was particularly inspiring: “I’ll take this torso and put it in my bedroom. That would give me a splendid Maillol of esthetic value equal to the financial.”4

  The Swiss Calvinist Béguin is ill at ease in the luxuriant scenario of Maillol’s studio: “No, everything cracks and crumbles under the shed roof; this autumn, apples from the apple trees between the breasts of the huge, broken torso, fill the valley of her thighs, a new Pomona that rots, bringing to an end this splendid health concretized so magnanimously. It inspires serious thoughts of theft and a new concept of others’ possessions. Gaston Béguin’s role is not an easy one, having to observe these slow deaths.”5

  Again Jeanneret jumps from describing the awkward Béguin, now
to amplify the merits of an artist who lived simply while cultivating monumental work: “The trees here are quite small and cover the ground. In fact, everything is small, the fruit, the cottages; the suburbs of Paris know nothing of the Kolossal and Aristide Maillol; ‘the world’s greatest sculptor,’ according to him, lives in a little house whose modesty reassures, comforts, and inspires thoughts of the futile and disappointing pomps of this world. The huge thighs of the torso of Phidias afford an adequate sensation of grandeur. And such grandeur is superior in terms of reverie. This odd combination of a Parthenonic Hellas corresponding to Hymettus and the Pentelic heights, of the Gulf of Salamis and the Peloponnesian rumps, ever so gently caressing the reveries of a man lost in the outskirts of the huge capital, in a minor jungle of sweet fruits in endless profusion.”6

  Jeanneret turns his sights to Jeanne, the wife of Gaspard Maillol, the sculptor’s nephew, who worked for him. Maillol was sculpting her. She is a “lovely young woman of magisterial bearing, shoulders as broad as her smile, and God knows voluptuous, to cut short the definition; in any case her lips are distinctly sinuous and the high cheekbones make her eyes squint in a countenance quite used to receiving à la française its constant coating of powder.”7

  Then, in his most competitive voice, Jeanneret deprecates a portrait Gaspard had painted of this beautiful woman to whom he had the good fortune to be married: “The gentleman who painted this must be as coarse as that famous brown and yellow oilcloth that covers the walls of the poor of Paris, as I discovered as a student in the hallways and W.C.s of cheap furnished rooms and on the partition walls of the blocks of slums still being torn down today. Poor powerful Jeanne whose behind or whose pink cretonne gowns serve as a pretext for this fake Douanier Rousseau.”8