His professional life, he assured Marie Jeanneret, was progressing miraculously, in spite of the inevitable hurdles. Father Couturier had proposed that he design a convent near Lyon; this was like having gold fall from the sky. But then came the counterpoint. The United States had vetoed Le Corbusier’s participation in the project he had expected to undertake for UNESCO in Paris, saying he was a communist. He intended to wage a defense campaign and take legal action at the embassy against these “dirty tricks.”18 And his colleague Jean Prouvé told him that Auguste Perret had voted against a second Unité d’Habitation in another French city, even insisting that the idea shouldn’t be considered.
The checks did not faze him anymore, Le Corbusier told his mother. He would no longer bow to the opposition—even for a minute.
LE CORBUSIER and Yvonne went to Roquebrune-Cap-Martin for Christmas and New Year’s. Since he had to be in Marseille at the start of January, it would be nice for Yvonne to celebrate her birthday so close to her birthplace. When they arrived, Le Corbusier slept sixteen hours a day for six days in a row—or so he claimed. On December 31, he drew, on the corner of a table at l’Etoile de Mer, the plans for a small cabanon. The following day, he gave them to Yvonne as a birthday present (on January 4, she would turn sixty), along with the declaration that he would construct the little house alongside l’Etoile de Mer, “on a spit of rock pounded by the waves.”19
It took him three quarters of an hour to make those plans. Le Corbusier had evolved to complete simplicity. For the public, he was multiplying regular units by the thousand; for his own purposes, and those of his wife, he had made one modest room.
In both instances, the framework was solid and simple to facilitate focus on the essentials. A balanced life did not require complicated trappings. The holiday cabanon was to be as lean and purely functional as possible, devoid of bric-a-brac or unnecessary objects.
The Modulor provided the proportions; a lifetime devoted to a consideration of what it takes for people to live in their houses determined the rest. In making a birthday present for the ill, nervous, fragile, and good-hearted but vituperative Yvonne, his wounded bird, Le Corbusier had, simultaneously, created his own ideal.
7
Le Corbusier was now guiding the building in Marseille toward completion. In mid-January 1952, he wrote his mother that the project was “astounding. A crescendo.”20
Yet the other side of martyrdom was present as always. Although the office was bustling with activity, Le Corbusier’s enemies still plagued him. In the same letter, he complained, “Nasty guys have played dirty tricks and robbed me of important commissions.” As much as he was having his way about l’Unité d’Habitation, control eluded him on other fronts: Marie had agreed to have four meals per week prepared for her but protested the idea of his covering two of them, with the bills going directly to de Montmollin. Albert was equally obstreperous; he had failed to send music that Le Corbusier wanted to have performed and published. Le Corbusier told his mother he’d like to come visit them for a day, “But such trips are exhausting in the long run. And I need a little calm.”21 The final word was underlined twice—to emphasize how miffed he was never to experience it with her and his brother.
Then, in the third week of January, Le Corbusier returned to India. To Yvonne, he wrote: “Your husband swims through the air like a fish through water. Airplanes are fabulous!”22 Swimming and flying were his ideal states: swift, effective, and purposeful.
First, he met with his client Mona Sarabhai in Ahmedabad; then he was driven in Thapar’s car on the long journey north from Delhi to Chandigarh. India again filled him with unequaled joy. He was thrilled to be with the likable Thapar and happy to return to the same splendid room in Simla, which Pierre had now personalized with knickknacks and photos.
One Sunday, even though it was a workday for the natives, he simply stayed in bed. He claimed to Yvonne he had not done this for thirty years. Nostalgic for that period when they had first met, invoking the nickname she then used for him, he wrote her, “I remembered that now immortal rue Jacob, where you would emerge from the bed or the bedroom, tits to the wind, shouting ‘Dou! Dou! Dou!’”23
At the start of April, the architect sent his mother a copy of a letter from Thapar reporting that Nehru was extremely pleased with all the construction in Chandigarh and was requesting another meeting with Le Corbusier in Delhi. He enclosed a translation of a letter Nehru had written about Chandigarh to the Planning Commission of India, in which the prime minister identified “Mr. Corbusier” as “perhaps the world’s greatest architectural authority.” Nehru praised Le Corbusier especially for not copying a foreign style and for “taking into account our particular climate and other consequences,” marking a radical change from the colonialist tradition of imposing a style from the outside.24
Nehru saw Le Corbusier as the embodiment of a truly democratic spirit of architecture. The new city would provide affordable housing that was a miraculous improvement over the squalid living conditions it was replacing. Nehru wrote, “Nothing is more horrible than the housing for ‘peons’ or ‘servants,’ the standard type of which arrived with the British and have continued, with certain variations, ever since.”25 Le Corbusier presented a refreshing alternative to the small and dark rooms in which the workers had previously lived, providing each dwelling with a shower or a water closet or a kitchen. If there was no chance of all three, the presence of running water was itself a miracle.
8
In 1952, between trips, Le Corbusier did a series of exceptionally large paintings and began making cartoons for tapestries measuring nearly five by three meters. The spirited work features voluptuous women with immense breasts and hips. It has spirit and vigor but lacks the quality or originality of Le Corbusier’s architecture. Nonetheless, those paintings and tapestries, as well as the architect’s sculpture, figured in all the exhibitions and publications in which he had a hand. Le Corbusier succeeded in coercing editors and curators to accord his nonarchitectural work the stature of the buildings.
There was no aspect of the visual world that did not intrigue him, no detail he didn’t consider both visually and symbolically. He was obsessed, for example, by his pajamas. He wanted them solid colored, dark, cuffless, and, imperatively, with no white piping. When the best shirtmakers on the Left Bank did not have what he required, he protested that what they sold was unbecoming and looked like theatre costumes, and was annoyed to be informed “we always do it that way.”26
Whatever Le Corbusier wore fit impeccably and was of the highest quality. For work, he usually opted for dark business suits, occasionally double-breasted but mostly classically cut, the only hint of dandyism being his signature bow ties and bright pocket handkerchiefs. In the tropics, he switched from navy pinstripe to crisp white linen suits. When he painted at home, he often sported a bold plaid lumberjack shirt, and for walks in the Bois a leather bomber jacket. His choices were jaunty and emphatically masculine.
On one of his transatlantic crossings on an ocean liner, Le Corbusier lamented the drabness of the usual male evening wear: “I asked the purser for dinner clothes with some color: the stewards dressed in vermilion are in keeping with the pomp of the ship; at dinner the rest of us are like people at a country funeral; the beautiful women seem like flowers in the splendors of their gowns. It is a curious end result of civilization that men who used to wear ostrich plumes on their heads, rose, white and royal blue, a vesture of brocades or shimmering silk, should no longer know how to do anything but thrust their hands into the pockets of their black trousers.”27
In clothing as in architecture, it was time for a totally new approach. Le Corbusier longed for greater color and playfulness in everyday wear: “The question has to be reconsidered, and the transformation of masculine costume is necessary. It is as difficult as changing the ethics and institutional state of a society. Costume is the expression of a civilization. Costume reveals the most fundamental feelings: through it we show our dignity,
our distinction, our frivolity, or our basic ambitions. Though standardized, masculine dress does not escape individual decision. But it is no longer suitable. From what persists, we have proof that the machine-age revolution has not reached maturity.”28
Le Corbusier lectured a group of male architecture students that they should consider expressing more flair and optimism in how they dressed: “Nowadays people are unaware of the power of color as it was used in Doric or medieval times. They know nothing of the clarity or glitter of golds, or mirrors, or silks, or brocades, or of Louis XIV, and Louis XV felts. The strength, health and joy of aristocrats in other times strike our grocer types as lacking the necessary degree of refinement. That revolution of consciousness belatedly emerging now after having too long burdened society, will one day even affect our dress. Women have already taken the lead. Their styles and fashion are bold, sensitive, expressive. Just look at the young girls of 1942. Their hair styles reflect a healthy and optimistic outlook. They go forth crowned in gold or ebony. But in the reign of Louis XIV or during the Renaissance, you boys are the ones who would have been as radiant as archangels with hair like theirs, and strong as Mars and handsome as Apollo. But the women have stolen your thunder.”29
Always interested in what Yvonne and other females wore, Le Corbusier made some women’s clothing designs, which he felt were breakthroughs. In 1952, Henri Cartier-Bresson, who had just photographed the architect for Harper’s Bazaar, encouraged him to submit the designs to Lily van Ameringen, his editor there. Le Corbusier described his concept to van Ameringen as “a woman’s costume for actual life (which sacrifices in no way feminine charms)…not a fashionable creation but a new mode of dressing.” Le Corbusier had already patented both the idea of this outfit and his description of it. “I would like to earn a fortune in dollars in the States,” he wrote van Ameringen, while explaining that his goal was to see these garments made in a range of materials. He felt they would give “a modern woman a free and easy comportment and a charm that is a direct result of physical allure (when it exists).”30
The architect made three drawings. The first shows a loose-fitting V-neck blouse with three-quarter-length sleeves and a diaphanous pleated skirt. In the second, the blouse is removed, showing that the skirt is the bottom of a dress with a tight-fitting, low-cut, short-sleeve jersey as its top. The third is the same dress worn folded to be shorter. He drew these combinations on bodies that look like Greek statues except for their hairstyles, which resemble those of the prostitutes he had admired on the Métro thirty years earlier.
Le Corbusier considered his concept “more durable than ephemeral.” He explained that the loose top was basically a poncho to be removed. The second sketch revealed his idea for a “tea gown,” with its clinging top and flowing bottom. In the third drawing, the pleated skirt had been pulled up a few inches, gathered at the waist, and secured with an elastic belt, to make it easier for the wearer “to walk, work, move, get in and out of carriage, a bus, etc.” The outfit was shown with “dainty sandals convenient for walking. These sandals have a good-size heel but not the high heel which is disastrous (though most charming…but alas!). Corns, which so often haunt stylishly shoed ladies, will disappear. Nylon stockings will no longer be a good bargain; they are often a hindrance even though they look so well.” The wearer could, in bad weather, put her sandaled feet directly into thick boots: “The contrast between a thick boot, easy to put on, and the feminine exquisiteness is an asset. Exit nylon stockings, enter thick boots: from a certain point of view the last items can perhaps replace the first.”31
Like his housing types, Le Corbusier’s clothing idea had universal application and served multiple purposes. The garments could be made of the cheapest Indian cotton or of “priceless wools and silks.” The architect credited himself with having considered all human needs: “This costume is made for a living creature with a skeleton, muscles and flesh, necessary plumpness and slimness. All these essential feminine characteristics have been considered by the gentleman who, although an architect and a painter, is not blind and can appreciate what is always agreeable to be seen and what is best to hide some times, leaving to circumstances the occasion or the pretext to certain delights of discovery.”32
9
In December 1950, Yvonne had written Albert and Marie a year-end greeting pointing out that 1951 would be her sixtieth year. The frail Monegasque told her in-laws that Le Corbusier always compared her to a six-year-old. In his messy script, he had written on her neat missive that “she has kept the soul of a child.”33
There is a wonderful group photograph that includes Picasso and “Yvonne Le Corbusier,” and that shows her at her most relaxed. A patch of bright sunlight makes a triangle across Picasso’s face, virtually blinding him, but he doesn’t flinch. Yvonne has her usual scarf tied tight around her head. They could be members of a large Mediterranean family on a Sunday afternoon—content to be together, but each lost in a lazy reverie, even though other people are trying to talk to them. It is clearly very hot out; the painter has the sleeves of his white shirt rolled up a couple of notches, and the shirt is open practically to his belt buckle, in a swooping V that reveals a mass of gray chest hair. Yvonne, looking earthily sexy in spite of the visible ravages of illness, is in a short-sleeve flowered blouse. She seems very feminine and strong willed; he is markedly masculine and powerful. These are tough, vibrant people, stolid and sensuous at the same time, in some way very much at home with who they are in the world. Yvonne may have maintained “the soul of a child,” just as Picasso regularly said he aimed to do, but she bears the weathered looks of someone who has lived long and hard.
With Pablo Picasso and Yvonne at l’Unité d’Habitation in Marseille in August 1949
The setting is l’Unité d’Habitation in Marseille. The event was Picasso’s visit to the site in 1949. Le Corbusier guided him through it, and the painter was fascinated by all the surprises. He spent an entire day exploring Le Corbusier’s complex and found it admirable in all its details as well as its overall form. If Balthus was telling the truth when he said that he and Picasso had both mocked Le Corbusier’s abstract modernism of the thirties, now that Le Corbusier was building for the masses in a style that celebrated complexity, Picasso had reversed his opinion.
Le Corbusier proudly referred for the rest of his life to how much Picasso loved the building, even in its unfinished stage. From Le Corbusier’s point of view, there were few people whose endorsement mattered more: “There’s nothing to say about Picasso because Picasso is inexplicable. Picasso does his work. The result is greatness. You like Renoir? Then go see Picasso and discover that Renoir becomes anecdotal. Picasso is not a bluffer. He’s not what we call an artiste-peintre. He works, calls everything into question, searches for new answers. He’s a creator in the biggest sense of the word. There’s no ‘Picasso case.’ There’s a man who has never stopped.”34
Visiting the building site of l’Unité d’Habitation in August 1949 with Pablo Picasso and Françoise Gilot
A couple of years later, Picasso invited Le Corbusier to construct a wall at his villa in Golfe Juan. According to Paulo Picasso, the artist’s son, the architect misunderstood what his father wanted, which had been transmitted in a message rather than in a face-to-face conversation. Le Corbusier simply provided a couple of practical suggestions on construction technique. Of the many unrealized projects in Le Corbusier’s life, one of the most intriguing to contemplate is what he would have made if he had collaborated with Pablo Picasso.
10
One of the many things Le Corbusier and Marguerite Tjader Harris had in common was a fealty to their aged mothers. In June 1952, Tjader Harris wrote that her mother had died that February. Le Corbusier had first come to know the older woman seventeen years earlier, in her house in Connecticut. It was a habit for the lovers to dine with Mrs. Tjader and Toutou before leaving the grandmother in charge of the little boy when they went off to the beach shack.
When Tjader Harris wr
ote Le Corbusier with the news, she added, “She died, as she lived, a Saint, ‘filled with truth and grace.’” The divorcée had, to the end, been living with her parent on the family estate, Vikingsborg, in Connecticut. Le Corbusier wrote her there immediately, “I’m terribly sorry about your mother’s death. I know nothing about things of the Beyond except for the Gate of the Beyond, the only geographical site known to us ordinary mortals.”35
The daughter was candid about the financial consequences; beyond the large house and half of the property, she had inherited a great deal of money. She instantly had an idea about how to spend some of it. Le Corbusier could design either two or four small houses on the land next to her Connecticut mansion, all one-story dwellings like La Petite Maison, which had first attracted her to his work and thus led to their meeting in Vevey. The houses would face the water and fit in with the large rocks and trees there. She would create an artists’ colony, lending or renting these modest residences to worthy people.
If only Le Corbusier could come to America, just for a couple of days, to make a master plan. “You know that I’m a person of action, and this time I have the money to realize those dreams,” his lover assured him. It was a good investment; she knew young architects who would help; it would be a “little project, gay and simple and good.”36 Her brother, who was converting the larger of two garages into his own house, agreed to the idea.
Tjader Harris would fund his air ticket so that he could come right away; it was no problem if he used the free trip for more important matters: “May God guide your response and may all creation be made by Him and with Him and for Him.”
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