The natural world and effective machinery were sublime, while the world of business was fit only for con artists. The person about whom he was now most cynical was himself, in the management of the factory at Alfortville: “At 6 in the morning at my factory, what color, what design! The ferryman, the chimneys, and those men of mine who by shrewd accountability and a soon-to-come redistribution, sweat and strain twelve hours and earn my living for me.” Jeanneret relished “that force of the master who comes to command all those who produce.” Machinery responded similarly to proper controls. He noted “the powerful machines, which ask nothing better than to produce, which ask only to serve, which bestow abundance upon the man who knows how to love them properly.”44
Jeanneret himself was at last in the position he wanted: “Like a little centaur, I return along the riverbanks, drawn by its fine piers worthy of Seurat, that river worthy of all the love and caresses it receives, by so much gay sunshine on the world and in my heart. In my heart that decision of beneficent calm, that will to pleasure, for it had been too long I had tried to force life instead of simply giving myself up to it.”45
Giving himself up meant that he would spend more time painting. He was convinced that the brick factory had achieved its objectives and was functioning on its own, with no risk of a downturn, so he now had his afternoons free to concentrate on art. He was delusional in believing that he and Max Du Bois and a third man, Edgard Louis Bornand, had been offered full control of SABA, and that since it was already doing 1.5 million francs’ worth of business a year, it would do 2.5 million the next—enabling him to work only a few hours a day while earning a fortune for the rest of his life. But the fantasy gave him the assurance to believe he might throw himself into his painting as never before.
XV
1
On July 4, Jeanneret joined the spectators watching the American soldiers march through the streets of Paris. No one else could have seen or heard that event in the same way, or calibrated human behavior as he did. He wrote in his diary, “July 4: Independence Day. American troops by the thousand paraded stiffly across the place de la Concorde in an oppressive silence, faces impassive above their helmet straps, though a few flowers were tossed. A strange stream of massive steel followed, rumbling tanks maneuvering slowly down the boulevards. Soldiers of the Second Crusade, with the sentiment that, having come here from so far away in order to die, it was for God or his equivalent; the innumerable crowd manifested in stupefaction the fruits of their victory over the demoniac madman. There followed the YWCA, homely and clumsy women in Salvation Army outfits, here to save the world. And the soft skies of Paris witnessed such things with astonishment, and the grace of the huge palaces and the charm of the parks seemed disconcerted. Then came the poilus, their short, sharp bayonets unsheathed, as if for harvesting wheat. The blue horizon of this womb of the Ile-de-France enskied the crowd’s grisaille, and all the soldiers were covered with pale pink chrysanthemums, their bayonets garlanded with daisies and cornflowers. The mob of women, relieved that the massive khaki vision had passed like some kind of strange carapace, cried out: ‘Les poilus, our poilus!’ and the men laughed and wagged their heads. Bugles blew, and an armored plane looped the loop around the Obelisk of Luxor. There was great enthusiasm all over the country, a huge rush of confidence. America had surpassed all expectations, it had confounded all expectations. Mammon? no; a Protestant preacher in a black frock coat, yes. Wilson—Peter the Hermit. These cowboys in the Paris of eternal grisettes, in the festivities celebrated among the trees and in the clouds, were, for all their athletes’ build, communicants of a sort on church steps: the fields of Champagne, the hills of the Vosges. These troops of bodies efficient as machines would serve to give Hindenburg the poignant terrors of nightmare.”1
It wasn’t the only time that American soldiers impressed him with their strapping bodies and innocent strength. Male power—which L’Eplattenier, Perret, and Ozenfant possessed in their artistic achievement as surely as these young military men did in their physiques—intoxicated him. Only when he felt endowed by it himself would he fully escape La Chaux-de-Fonds and the weak air of compromise he associated with his father.
2
Weeks after Jeanneret had determined that his business was flourishing and his finances solid, production at the brick factory dropped precipitously. He could no longer afford to imagine more time painting; he had to throw himself into the work at Alfortville: “My business has taken its revenge. I must get back into harness, and how!” In July, he borrowed thirty-five thousand francs that would be due on August 15; it was his only hope. A heat spell and drought made everything worse; suddenly, city life was losing all its appeal, and he began to contemplate escape from his paradise of a few weeks earlier. Nietzsche offered the latest solution: “Opened Zarathustra at random, and at random found: ‘Do not stir the swamps. Live on the mountains.’ We shall see.”2
HE WENT ON another rampage about prostitutes, whose lives increasingly obsessed him. Other men had the hypocrisy to call commercial sex “lovemaking” he knew better. The term was a travesty; these victims who sold sex took no pleasure in it. The one great thing—for him as well as for them—was women having sex with one another: “And that eternal comedy, tonight more cynical than ever. And they call lovemaking LOVE!!! 2 a.m. In the stupefying silence of the city, the rumble of cannons at the front. And the only real pleasure was that I ‘did her portrait.’ And she carried it off to end up in some joke with another man’s condoms. These women have no use for men. And they let themselves be had! Women loving women—that’s what appeals to me, the only decent, the only passionate love.”3
Jeanneret painted lesbian sex in a series of watercolors (see color plate 9). He celebrated the subject with pen-and-ink strokes and splashes of color as robust as the women who were his subject. One work depicts, from above, a heavyset woman, the curves of her buttocks center stage, performing oral sex on another amply proportioned woman, who leans backward, savoring her pleasure as she looks at us in brazen delight. Another image shows three women wrapped around one another. They loll on a sofa in a display of unabashed hedonism, with a bottle and glasses of red wine completing the scenario. One woman is entirely naked except for green stockings that stop just above her knees; another is scantily clad in a blue dress that leaves her breasts exposed.
Jeanneret wrote Ritter about a taxi he had jumped into just after a woman got out in front of his office building: “And all the same I held on to that sensation of the odor of calm voluptuousness…in a taxi which I took the moment a woman of tremendous elegance left it outside ‘Alex,’ her dressmaker in the apartment building of 29 bis. The taxi was full of that perfume, and I got my hopes up all over again, the slave yet again of ‘wealth.’”4 The more he had to study sheets of numbers through his thick eyeglasses, the more he longed for the sensual experiences that beckoned at every turn.
3
If only he could reconcile his desires with his actions.
Jeanneret continued to report ebulliently to Ritter about his solitary erections. The complete sexual act—which for him meant being with a prostitute—brought greater guilt and conflict: “I thought I recognized a woman I had slept with and whom I remembered as charming. In a corner bistro, her hair done up and her face plastered with makeup, she was fraternizing with four or five professional tarts, women in wigs and so insolently crude and bestial I never even look at them. Of course any painter would fall to his knees. Coulon [a colleague in the Briquetterie d’Alfortville] calls me a pig.”5
Even with the whores who were more to his taste, he was aware of his essential solitude. “Women so pretty, so well dressed and fresh and cheerful, Paris still so much a bouquet of pink flesh. The heart remains alone when the body does its thing. There’s no time for love, and that’s the problem. Amusement. One would easily understand, lacking the sob of the sveltes jets-d’eau parmi les marbres, the spasm of resignation of the eternal solitary, ever more confirmed in this noisy void.”
6
By the end of July, Jeanneret was experiencing “black days…the great wave of pessimism is about to break over so much previous optimism.” His foreman at the brick factory gave notice. The enterprise was a complete failure; Jeanneret sadly reported that “Alfortville will be empty and silent after all the uproar of the machines.”7 He was completely discouraged about his architectural work as well.
But then, at the last minute, he managed to get a loan of thirty-five thousand francs from members of the Swiss community in Paris, which enabled him to repay the bank for the cash advance that was about to be due and was plaguing him. “Acquaintances in the Swiss colony, friends of friends. And tonight it happened: the 35,000 francs are here,” he wrote on July 26. It was a vital life lesson: “In my success I had many enemies. I discovered many friends in difficulty.”8
He wavered between hope and despair. At the end of July, Jeanneret had a dream that, as bombs were falling, he was embracing the dancer Mistinguett—famous throughout France for her good legs. He treated the dream as if it were reality: “This morning I was in Mistinguett’s arms. We were lovers. We were dancing pressed close together. I kissed her deeply. She had chosen me because I had a funny priest’s face. We were waltzing slowly, all our senses aroused; there were planes dropping bombs. I asked her if she had loved my compatriot Maurice Barraud. At this she turned to ice and let me go and I woke up. I’m bored with women and yet I’m exhausted for them.”9
HE STILL HAD his parents’ housing to resolve. Georges and Marie Jeanneret had agreed to move near Montreux, on Lake Geneva. Edouard began to design their new dwelling and work out all the details of size and cost. In the meantime, he found a place for them to rent that had room for Pauline as well. Their acceptance of his authority put him back on course.
Every evening from nine to twelve and throughout the day on Sundays, Jeanneret was drawing and painting. In his diary of August 2, he wrote, “I’m drawing médoc bottles, coffeepots, and pipes with a pencil sharpened like a needle, determined to create form in terms of volume. My palette has been reduced to four colors, red and yellow ochre, ultramarine, and black. And I’m approaching the paradise of power; I feel I’m on the way. Soon I’ll be using oils and in 3 or 4 years, I’ll have something to show.”10 Painting even more than architecture, he now believed, was to be his means toward clarity and stability.
4
In July 1918, Ozenfant divorced his wife, Zina. He told people this was in part because of his new closeness to Jeanneret. The two men had become “we.” At the start of September, Ozenfant invited Jeanneret to go to Andernos, near Bordeaux on the southwest coast, on the Bay of Arcachon, for ten days; it was a holiday from their regular jobs but also the chance to develop a mutual manifesto about art.
Ozenfant read out loud to Jeanneret about Purism and proposed that they collaborate on a book presenting their ideas on it. In a rare moment of self-effacement, Jeanneret accepted with the insistence that Ozenfant’s name go first, contrary to alphabetical order. They painted simultaneously, and their canvases of bold, abstract forms were similar, even though each signed his own pictures and had his particular characteristics. Their shared vision mattered more than their individual selves; the two stalwarts wanted the world to consider them a perfect unit.
JEANNERET worshipped Ozenfant’s precise thinking, his strength and calm, and his clear sense of what art was. His new savior was also the master of the technical know-how Jeanneret considered imperative. He wrote Ritter, “Above all he’s understood the métier; he paints as well as the painters of automobile bodies. He’s the master I have been searching for all this time, he achieves what I was crying for so loudly in the course of my disappointing ejaculations of this last year.”11
Ozenfant also demonstrated the courage to start at zero, which was another of Jeanneret’s imperatives for a purposeful existence. He had recently divested himself of an accumulation of luxurious possessions and had reduced his holdings to a sofa bed, six bentwood Thonet chairs from 1840, a plain round mahogany table that belonged to his grandmother, an easel, a few plates and casserole dishes, and the books on his bedside table. He had even destroyed many of his own early sketches and paintings that he disliked. Living austerely in an apartment, which had the cachet of having been Stendhal’s one hundred years earlier, Ozenfant was an even better god than L’Eplattenier and Matthey combined.
5
Jeanneret wrote Ritter and Czadra: “Everything is at the zenith, after so much misfortune.”12 He had been named administrator-delegate of a company that made large blocks, conglomerates of asbestos and cement used to cover apartment buildings; beyond that, he had overcome his loneliness. Jeanneret and Ozenfant were preparing for a joint exhibition of their paintings while writing their book. “Our collaboration is an intimate one. Ozenfant is noble and broad-minded. Intimacy. We giggle like boys. There is grippe all around us; we drink camomile tea, cognac, we smoke—how we smoke!”13
Because he did not want it known that he was not devoting all of his time to his business ventures, he kept his painting private from everyone other than Ritter and Ozenfant, but it was his refuge. “When I’m drawing I seem to be elsewhere. I maintain absolute secrecy; it would be a scandal if anyone knew I was daily tickling the muses.” How grateful he was to the friend of Picasso and Apollinaire who had given him this impetus: “All this is due to Ozenfant, and to my star.”14
6
Ozenfant and Jeanneret decided to call their book After Cubism. Having scrapped their decision about the order of their names, they now planned to publish it anonymously, to give their words the ring of a religious doctrine.15
Whenever Jeanneret embarked on a new venture, it was both an exaltation of the good and a fight against the bad. On October 1, he wrote Ritter, “We’re all too sensitive to the subtle and facile and lazy talent of Apollinaire and his friends, so that having settled down to work, having realized the great seriousness of life, we react against the facile buffoonery of these older comrades.”16 Painting and writing with Ozenfant, Jeanneret felt he was now working “with courage and simplicity, and in harmony with what we love around us. As an artist, how far I feel from artists. Things are clearer to me now; I see my way, having spent many years in confusion.”17
Then, in late December, an hour after he put the text for After Cubism into the mail, Jeanneret learned that Apollinaire had died. “I regret Apollinaire’s death, the loss of a powerful adversary. There are so few strong men and so many inert followers!” he wrote Ritter.18 As the inventor of the term “l’esprit nouveau,” Apollinaire had been an ally, but Jeanneret considered his defense of Cubism the mark of decadence. Nonetheless, the people who counted were the ones who took a stance; a fighter and believer was better than a eunuch.
Jeanneret himself was now working eighteen hours a day, including Sundays. Happily he gave up dinner with friends; mere socializing was a waste of time. He had even forgotten both his parents’ birthdays. The lapse brought on manic excitement rather than regret; he wrote them, “Forgive me. You know my credo in life. You must see the bright and the dark and keep only the bright.”19 Now that he was making and writing about art, he was convinced the gleam could last.
XVI
1
The war has left throughout Europe a mood of disillusionment and despair which calls aloud for a new religion, as the only force capable of giving men the energy to live vigorously.
—BERTRAND RUSSELL
When After Cubism appeared following the armistice, Jeanneret and Ozenfant were convinced that their cry for artistic revolution at this transitional moment of history was the most important doctrine of the new era. Their manifesto begins with a flourish: “The war over, everything is reorganizing, clarifying, and focusing; factories are being built; already nothing is what it was before the war: the great rivalry has tested everything, has discarded senile methods and replaced them with those which the struggle has proved to be superior…. Never since Pericles had thought been so lucid.”1
Ozenfant and Jeanneret’s premise was that Cubism, embraced by a decadent bourgeoisie, was inadequate for the changed civilization. What was needed instead was a new, orderly world, in which science and art would function in tandem. Machinery, industrialization, and technology were the modern gods; painting and architecture should reflect their capabilities and truthfulness.
Jeanneret and Ozenfant advocated the “tendency toward rigor, toward precision, toward the best utilization of forces and materials, with the least waste, in sum a tendency toward purity”—as it was found in ocean liners and other streamlined and efficient objects.2 Their goal was to create a pure and serious art based on invariable laws, mathematics, and order as it exists in nature. They extolled the human body as an excellent mechanism, symmetrical and harmonious, organized for maximum efficiency, and they pointed out that “nature resembles not a fairyland without plan but a machine.” The writers belittled all that was “garish” or “noisy” or “incoherent” in contrast to this seamless union of science and art. As opposed to artistic movements like Dadaism and Expressionism, with their emphasis on the haphazard and the emotional, their Purism depended on simple, universal subject matter like a bottle of ubiquitous form, “banal for the indifferent observer,” or an ordinary tree. General, invariable characteristics counted more than personal expression. “Chance is what art casts out; it is the opposite of art,” Jeanneret and Ozenfant declared. “The true purist work should conquer chance and channel emotion; it should be the rigorous image of a rigorous conception…. Purism expresses not variations, but what is invariable.”3
The idea was noble, but the art in which Jeanneret realized the strict intentions of Purism has a stifled quality. Working out the need to take rigid control of his emotions, he suffocated his pictures. Fortunately, in his subsequent architecture he moved beyond the tight guidelines he imposed so stridently on his vision in 1918, and permitted the quirks that breathe in the force of life requisite for masterpieces.
Le Corbusier Page 21
