Le Corbusier

by Nicholas Fox Weber

  The lover of impeccable functioning was bowled over by Ozenfant’s new car. The two friends spent a May afternoon in Versailles, zooming around in the spiffy model made of two “airplane bucket-seats” on a single chassis. Weighing only three hundred kilograms, endowed with an exceptionally strong motor, it could readily pass everything else on the road. Jeanneret wanted the speed of his life to echo the velocity of that automobile. “One is moved by this accelerated rhythm, and I take no pleasure strolling on foot through the woods,” he wrote his parents.20

  He had expanded his office at 29 bis rue d’Astorg to occupy four floors, and at home he had begun what became his habit of doing gymnastics every morning. Despite occasional migraines, he painted every night and on Sundays, side by side with Ozenfant. Earning twenty-eight thousand francs per year with his business enterprises, he was convinced that his plan to devote himself full-time to studio art was about to become reality.

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  Not everything was as clear as Charles-Edouard Jeanneret had thought. “All is confusion within me since I’ve gone back to drawing,” he wrote Ozenfant that June 9. “Sudden rushes of blood force my fingers into the realm of the arbitrary, my mind no longer guiding me…. Yet I feel such joie de vivre!…In my business affairs, I have discipline enough, I lack it in my heart, in my ideas. I have given too free rein to the habit of impulse.”1

  He confessed to his role model, “In my confusion I evoke your tranquil, clear will. It seems to me there is an abyss of age between us. I feel that I am on the threshold of study, you are already at the stage of realizations. Behind me I sensed the fluttering of a thousand intentions, violent, successive sensations, and I kept telling myself: ‘The day will come when I will build.’ The days have come, and I am a wretched mason at the bottom of the foundation pit, without plan!…And the things I paint have no weight, no massiveness, no indispensable existence.”2

  IN MID-OCTOBER, he sold one million bricks in a single day, and felt his optimism and energy renewed, but a month later all was gloom again. He wrote his father, a sure comrade in depression, “Here winter is raging, the price of life has become exorbitant, the labor question insoluble. I have just spent fifteen terrible days, and nothing has changed.” They were joined in their suffering: “I suspect that on your side, too, things have not been very cheerful…. We think of you often, but we lead on the whole a tyrannical existence, and what is most disturbing is that the circle of difficulties widens every day.”3

  He claimed to his parents that he had slept for forty-eight consecutive hours. As 1919 came to an end, Jeanneret’s energy was so depleted that he felt he could do nothing whatsoever.

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  At the end of January 1920, Jeanneret had another encounter that changed his life. Edouard’s second cousin Pierre Jeanneret, whom he had met a few years earlier, arrived in Paris to study architecture at l’Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Pierre—who was born in 1896 in Geneva and whose father was Georges Jeanneret’s first cousin—had studied at l’Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Genève. There, he won first prizes in painting, carving, and architecture. He had recently done his military service in the cyclist corps.

  Edouard’s initial reaction was a mix of moral superiority and sheer contempt. He wrote his parents, “I am actually stupefied by the apathy of this boy of twenty-three; his nature is thoughtful enough but so rarely individual. At twenty-three, I had seen the Acropolis and built the Villa Georges Favre, and I was already a tough customer. He is just beginning his studies and hasn’t a clue what direction to give them.”4 Yet, in spite of his reservations, Edouard sensed a potential alliance of great significance.

  He was also encouraged by the aftermath of his show at THOMAS. Now an exhibition of Jeanneret’s paintings was scheduled to open at Druet, one of the most prominent galleries in Paris, in January 1921. Needing to complete fifteen canvases in less than a year, he was painting at every moment that his other work allowed.

  Relations between Jeanneret and his parents were on the mend. Georges and Marie were happier now that they were in a rental in the village of Blonay, and the sale of the house was behind them. Edouard was jubilant over a cheerful letter from his father, writing back, “Everything goes well here and now it’s spring…. You’re happy! What a difference it makes for me to hear that you’re in that state of mind, whereas in 1918 it was the blackest depression.” His own work was soaring: “I receive the greatest encouragements, and I have complete confidence in the future.”5

  Again his goals were in sight. On June 19, 1920, Jeanneret wrote Ritter and Czadra, “Paris is the line of fire. A different song. And my ambition has impelled me to the same excesses of work, but differently conceived. I believe this will produce results. It appears that I have something in me, for I’m constantly grappling with all the big guns here—in business as in art. In art above all. My life is programmed, but the days have only twenty-four hours, and I must sleep seven of them. So everything must be done outside of the ten business hours: thinking, acting, writing, painting, even caring for this little heart ever continually crushed and baffled by other pains. When the program is major and organized as ours is, a hierarchy of access to time is set up. This would be untenable, physically and morally lethal, if it were to last all one’s life. I have arranged a very brief interlude at the expiration of which there will be painting.”6

  It was a productive summer. By July, he had finished ten paintings. Although he had initially set out to complete a total of fifteen, he now decided to reach twenty before the exhibition. Nothing stood in his way, not even the excessive heat. He felt guarded about his progress yet essentially victorious, writing Ritter, “What is wrong with oneself is nothing compared to the weakness of others whom fate has not armed with fangs. There is not only high life in Paris. And I am sometimes anxious about always feeling so strong, so implacable. Considering other people, one realizes one’s own happiness and the joy of one’s destiny. Paris, with its host of sufferings, has allowed me to be happy with mine.”7

  Charles-Edouard Jeanneret was preparing to create another self, with another name. This alter ego, relentlessly fired by purpose, was meant to be devoid of the vulnerability that had been the burden of his youth. He was already on his way to that loftier place, for he and Ozenfant were about to start a magazine that embraced a new way to live.

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  We founded L’Esprit Nouveau in order to open paths toward that laughing, clear and beautiful sky.

  —LE CORBUSIER

  The intention of the magazine L’Esprit Nouveau, first published in October 1920 by Ozenfant and Jeanneret with the avant-garde poet Paul Dermée, was to promote artistic balance and mathematical order as a means toward the contentment that was now possible with peacetime. “The goal of art is to put the spectator in a state of mathematical quality, that is, a state of an elevated order…. The highest declaration of the human mind is the perception of order, and the greatest human satisfaction in the feeling of collaboration or participation in this order,” they wrote.8

  With the inception of the new publication, Charles-Edouard Jeanneret underwent the transformation of his name. He signed several essays “Le Corbusier.” The pseudonym had the right ring. In one essay Jeanneret and Ozenfant defined a work of art as “an artificial physical object destined to produce subjective reactions” the name “Le Corbusier” suggested such an object designed to accommodate the “need for order…the most elevated of human needs.”9

  With Ozenfant and Albert Jeanneret in his studio in the Maison Blanche in August 1919, shortly before it was sold. The Serbian pot on his head was an acquisition from the journey to the east of 1911.

  Charles-Edouard Jeanneret had long sought a means to counter the perpetual vagaries of his own mind. With his new name, he invented a person who had a protective shell.

  Ozenfant adopted, for some of his writing, the name Saugnier, which had been his mother’s maiden name. Jeanneret said he hadn’t picked his mother’s maiden name because it would
only create confusion, being the same as that of the architects Perret. The explanation for the new name, promulgated by Le Corbusier himself, was that it derived from the name of his ancestor Lecorbesier. But there were a range of other reasons that led him to invent this sobriquet that had a more authoritative sound than “Perret” and endowed its bearer with the ability to have others “courber,” or bend to his will. Above all, “Le Corbusier” gave Charles-Edouard Jeanneret the toughness and resiliency he felt he needed.

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  When the first issue of L’Esprit Nouveau appeared on October 15, 1920, an article signed by Le Corbusier and Saugnier, entitled “Three Reminders to Architects,” declared the universality, timelessness, and supreme beauty of “cubes, cones, spheres, cylinders, and pyramids.” It cited the fundamentality of these forms to ancient architecture—from the Egyptian pyramids to the Greek temples—and to American silos and factories. Engineering had infinite value, whereas design for its own sake was decadence; mechanical calculations were superior to architectural folly.

  On paper, everything was clear and certain; in reality, it was not. By November 1920, Jeanneret was again having serious problems at Alfortville, where the factory had a surplus of bricks. Making five hundred thousand per week, it now had a stockpile of 1,300,000 that no one wanted to buy.

  Having only recently encouraged his parents to come to Paris and participate in its pleasures, he now wrote them, as if it were the only truth, “Life has been hard for me. It becomes harder and harder. Don’t think I’m becoming insensitive. I am forced to choose, for the years pass tragically fast, and my work must not escape me. You cannot imagine what the struggle is like here in Paris. You have to have put yourself forward in order to realize it. This in the realm of ideas. There are distances created which are those of the mind and of comprehension. These distances have, for instance, alienated many of my old friends. But false good manners fall away and what remains is esteem and affection, which I feel very strongly here, where I am full of courage and certainty.”10

  Having deliberately shed the family name and set his sights on spreading his gospel everywhere, at age thirty-three he still cared desperately about open and truthful communication with these two people who had raised him. “In any case, you are resting now, and it is your lack of calm and ease which so strongly affected me. It was this way of referring everything to your own level of comprehension and thereby creating for yourself, through us, through me especially, cares and disappointments you had no need to experience. Next time, do not struggle so; let us gently make contact with the happiness of being with the two of you rested, serene, happy.”11

  That tight and complicated connection with his aging parents in the Swiss mountains, the interdependence of their happiness and his own, was a secret Le Corbusier carefully guarded from all who knew him in his new life. It both tortured and fortified him.

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  The Galerie Druet normally exhibited artists of the School of Paris, among them Matisse and Bonnard. Art as didactic and programmatic as the recent work by Jeanneret and Ozenfant, both of whom kept their old names as painters to make the distinction from their L’Esprit Nouveau selves, was a departure. Madame Druet, the widow of the gallery’s founder, had been persuaded by her director, Athis, to exhibit the two stalwarts of Purism, but it was not her personal taste.1 Once the show was installed for its opening on January 22, 1921, Druet glanced at it and promptly walked back into her office—never to be seen in the gallery during the two weeks the work was up.

  The twenty-five paintings by Ozenfant and twenty by Jeanneret were all the same format: one hundred by eighty-one centimeters. Those dimensions had an underlying mathematical purity; one hundred was ten squared, and eighty-one was nine squared. The formula facilitated the use of regulating lines—a passion of the painters, who had written about such proportional systems for the organization of building facades.

  Jeanneret’s canvases at Druet evinced considerable progress since his show at THOMAS. However formulaic and technically serial, they are lively and animated, more bold and audacious than his previous work or than Ozenfant’s paintings. The deliberately compressed surfaces of these elaborately structured canvases present highly charged forms with multiple meanings. A shallow plate reads as the sound hole of a guitar and the top of a smokestack at the same time, so that the musical instrument and the massive pipe have the same monumentality. The compositions are charged with a lively interplay between distinct flatness and three-dimensional dynamism. Jeanneret emphasized the recesses and curves, the masses and voids, with the eye of an architect.

  Music was often one of Jeanneret’s main motifs, with violins and guitars the dominant subject matter. As in musical compositions, each work has a powerful sense of progression; a major statement is followed by a sequence of reactions, with the elements different from one another yet carefully related. The earthy colors respond to one another as carefully and successfully as the four different instruments in a well-composed string quartet. The underlying plan is essential; true to his earliest training as a draftsman for the watchmaking industry, Jeanneret drew and painted on a modified grid.

  The paintings were signed “Jeanneret,” the drawings “L-C.” In pencil, L-C was neat and precise yet bold. He made a very physical rhythm, endowing forms with a sculptural mass, so that the viewer feels the tough and sturdy cylindricality of stovepipes; you have the sensation that you can grab the doorknobs and pour from the pitchers. L-C imbued simple objects with majesty; to render everyday life bountiful was his goal in all media and under all his names.

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  For eighteen months, Jeanneret had been so devoured by the need to paint that he had “withdrawn from everybody in order to execute a difficult task. I have not had enough of all the hours of the year, in an agitated life and a crushing load of work, to be able to give time even to my closest friends.” Obsession was Jeanneret’s mainstay; without it, he was worthless. He needed the urgency of work and his relentless pace to feel alive. “There was not a single hour of relaxation in the whole year,” he wrote Ritter and Czadra about his and Ozenfant’s preparations for the show.2 The intensity suited him. To halt or even falter for a moment would be like becoming a broken watch, with its hands frozen in place.

  Once the show opened, the audience response stung. It confirmed his horror of bourgeois taste—which did not ameliorate for the rest of his life: “The public reacts: praise or scorn and indignation. We thought we were so docile and we are treated like madmen.” Louis Vauxcelles accused the work of lacking humanity. Writing Ritter, Jeanneret responded as only he could: “Vauxcelles finds all this glacial and advises me to go sleep with a trollop in the Meudon woods. Vauxcelles is also called the Knight of the Doleful Countenance, for he is sad, very sad, and it takes paprika to enliven him; paprika and ringing gold coins.”3

  He continued, “Our paintings are taxed with being mechanical; myself I am certain that they imply a dream, a dignified and austere dream, but of an order above the gonads and the ‘heart.’”4 Jeanneret had hoped for a better response in part because he desperately needed to sell these paintings to survive. After his brief flash of success in his business ventures, following three years of trying to secure his fortune, he had been wiped out.

  He now definitively abandoned his efforts to work with industry, blaming the overall international financial crisis for this debacle. But Jeanneret did manage to find the funding, from a range of sources, to continue L’Esprit Nouveau. Its message was so imperative that it had to be saved at all cost.

  In an article for issue 10, Le Corbusier and Saugnier showed Greek temples and automobiles side by side. This was the essence of their gospel, for the comparison made the achievements of ancient Greece applicable to the modern world. “Geometry is our greatest creation and we are enthralled by it,” the authors wrote.5 Promulgating those values, Le Corbusier was on the upswing; it was a “period of healthy courage and clarity, the twilight of impressionism, of sy
mbolism, of what was beside the facts.”6

  Le Corbusier had a new realism about finances that Jeanneret had lacked in the days of the Maison Blanche. He recognized the necessity of funding to realize his artistic ideals, and beyond what he had found for the magazine, he succeeded in raising one hundred thousand francs for his other ventures. Cynically, he attracted the investors because he pandered to their wish for “profits, to be realized at a friendly businessmen’s lunch—convinced, between the fruit and the cheese, of the necessity of ennobling the financier’s profession by some vague investment on the dreamers’ behalf.”7

  For all the setbacks, his life plan was now working. To Ritter, he extolled his emergence on the world stage only three years after he had made his pivotal move from La Chaux-de-Fonds: “It so happens that today I exist, much more rapidly and more powerfully than I would ever have thought. This in a country of astonishing health. The German morbidezza is alarming, and the many books and periodicals we receive appall me, outrage me, stupefy me. Yet I could not have come to anything without this desert of ordeals, which is Paris, this city where choice functions with a terrible brutality, because I have created my identity on my own foundations, on my own terms.”8 Having mentally planned his new self, he was now succeeding in constructing it.

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  Following the war, geniuses in many domains voraciously explored new means of living well. Jeanneret had believed he would change the world as a painter. Now, as Le Corbusier, his mission was to transform the human condition through architecture. Convinced that the right visual environment had the power to elevate the souls of its inhabitants, he was determined to create settings for “healthy activity and industrious optimism.”1