Le Corbusier's Poems and Paintings Reveal the Foundation of His Character

"In it, I set down the categories of thought that daily life rarely lets us express. These things are not only the foundation of my work in architecture and painting — they are the foundation of my character. The work falls into seven parts: Environment, Mind, Flesh, Fusion, Character, Offering, Tool."

About the author:

Le Corbusier (1887–1965) was the most important architect and urban planner of the 20th century, regarded as the father of functionalism and a pioneer of modern architecture — often called modern architecture's standard-bearer. He was also a painter, sculptor, designer, and writer. Born in Switzerland in 1887, he took French citizenship in 1930 and died in 1965 at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, France.

Book excerpt:

Cracking Corbusier's Code (Introduction)

Wang Hui, Architect

What confounds readers most about Poem of the Right Angle is Corbusier's iconography — the key to understanding this collection of poems. The images themselves are already deeply mysterious, and no small number of scholars have studied them; one of the more authoritative essays is Richard A. Moore's "Alchemical and Mythical Themes in the Poem of the Right Angle, 1947–1965," published in the fall/winter 1980 issue of Oppositions. For Chinese readers, decoding these images with an even more esoteric iconography would only sink them deeper into fog — but explaining these themes without any iconography at all fails to convey even Corbusier's simplest meanings. So I've tried to use the metaphor of a key: these are only tools that help the reader open the doors to a series of rooms, not the scenery inside those rooms.

This iconographic information also mirrors, like a set of mirrors, the outlines of Corbusier's thought, feeling, and will — the necessary doors into his complete inner world. So these three keys correspond to three faculties: knowing, feeling, and willing. If "Star," "Cloud," and "Sword" describe Corbusier's personality, then "Knowing," "Feeling," and "Willing" are the questions one must examine to understand why an architect with character could produce architecture with character.

Knowing — the key of duality

In 1957, Yvonne, worn down by illness, passed away. Some of Corbusier's strange behavior at the time reveals the depth of his feeling for her. First he kept her body at home for several days; then, during the cremation, he suddenly pulled a bone from the fire. He carried that bone in his pocket ever after, taking it out and setting it on his drafting board whenever he drew alone. These eccentricities reveal something essential at the bottom of Corbusier's heart: a fascination with the mystical.

Corbusier did not practice religion, but that doesn't make him an outright atheist. His ancestors fled religious persecution from southern France to the mountains of Switzerland; their roots lay in the Cathars, a sect that flourished in southern France in the 11th and 12th centuries and was declared heretical by the Catholic Church in 1179. From 1209 to 1229, the Pope launched the twenty-year Albigensian Crusade, finally crushing the heresy in southern France. The deepest conflict between the Cathars and Catholicism was over dualism: the Cathars believed in two gods, a good god who created the spiritual world and an evil god who ruled the material world. They held that soul and body were not separate but locked in constant struggle, so that good and evil always appeared in pairs. This extreme opposition can express itself as a conflict between good and evil, but the world holds far more complexity, complementarity, and contradiction than that — expressed instead as fusion and synthesis. This idea of duality sat deep in Corbusier's thinking. So in Poem of the Right Angle, right after A depicts the precondition for human activity — Environment — B and C portray humanity's two sides, spirit and flesh, and D is the secret that keeps human activity going without end: an alchemical Fusion. In the contest between spirit and flesh, orthodox Catholicism always championed the triumph of spirit, and the world was always framed as a process of extraction. That kind of thinking has long held pompous authority, and it has long undermined the organic principle of coexistence with nature that humanity learned in the course of survival. So when B+C=Man, we return to A, and A and (B+C) form yet another dual fusion.

Dualism, without question, also lent the symbols their mystery. Whoever decodes them cannot precisely resolve what "signified" the encoder's "signifier" was pointing to: a fish beneath a woman's body, a horse beside her, a woman held in a giant hand, a woman sprouting a goat's horns — can these things really be answered?

Feeling — the key of emotion

This book is full of female nudes, a recurring subject in Corbusier's paintings too. They're symbolic, pointing toward Corbusier's emotional world. That emotional world, of course, isn't narrowly about his love affairs — it's the broader sensibility toward the world that Poem of the Right Angle set out to express: Corbusier's worldview.

At the opening of Modern Man: The Life of Le Corbusier, Architect of Tomorrow, currently the only Corbusier biography published in mainland China, author Anthony Flint describes a scene of Corbusier's assignation with the dancer Josephine Baker (1906–1975) aboard a ship returning from Rio de Janeiro to France in 1929. Looking across modern architecture's four great masters — Wright, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886–1969), and Walter Adolph Georg Gropius (1883–1969) all had love affairs worth gossiping about. Corbusier's thirty-year marriage, by comparison, was stable, and his wife, Yvonne Gallis, never involved herself in his career. If anything, she and Corbusier seem to have shared little common interest, and she forbade talk of architecture at home. Though full-figured and always heavily made up, she smoked and drank in daily life, and could talk back to Corbusier's scolding in front of his staff. It's hard to picture her as the muse in Corbusier's paintings. Yet this was the woman who ballasted his whole life, the one who gave him balance. In a letter to his mother, he praised her for "fulfilling her duties as a wife better and better; she tolerates some of my quirks. She is gentle, considerate, understanding, always there when needed. Good, a good girl." When away from home, his letters to his wife were always full of love and respect too, which also reflects Corbusier's general attitude toward women. So the "Character" section of Poem of the Right Angle seems to be written for his wife: "She holds reason, she rules, she maintains the heights, yet does not know it. Who made her? Where did she come from? She is uprightness, a child clear within, appearing on the earth, close beside me. The humble acts of everyday life prove her greatness." He needed her rule — and needed, at the same time, that she not know she ruled.

The other such "she" was Corbusier's mother, who died in 1960 at the age of exactly one hundred. Corbusier himself was already in his seventies by then, but before his mother he remained forever a child — a child who constantly needed her favor and approval, clearly documented in the many letters he wrote her. In an era when Freudian psychoanalysis dominated 20th-century thought, this Oedipal attachment is also a key to understanding Corbusier's paintings.

With a woman holding down reason at home, Corbusier's occasional dissipation abroad gave him richer inspiration still. Interestingly, Corbusier made no effort to hide his affairs in his drawings, whether it was someone he grew close to, like Baker, or a passing encounter, like the women of Algiers. After 1924, as he split from Ozenfant, Corbusier's painting began abandoning the frozen compositions, collaged still lifes, and cold colors of his Purist period, moving toward a symbolist style centered on the human body. On the canvases in his studio, the vivid female nudes that had lingered in his sketchbooks gradually deconstructed, distorted, and exaggerated into symbols for thought.

Willing — the key of painting

The third key is the key of painting. We've noted that Corbusier's paintings aren't artistically of the highest order — certainly not up to contemporaries he knew well, like Picasso or Léger, and not even up to Ozenfant, once so close to him in style that the two men's work was hard to tell apart. Corbusier refused to concede the point. Proposing a foundation to permanently preserve the paintings that had "landed" in his hands, he struck this haughty pose: "I have never troubled myself with selling my art. Every sale is priced steeply (matching Fernand Léger's prices, so dealers can identify me by it). I have neither the time nor the interest to busy myself with that; the days are too short." But if he had no time to manage his paintings, he certainly found time to paint them. In fact, no architect before or since has poured as much time into painting as Corbusier did. From the moment he moved to Paris and met Ozenfant, Corbusier devoted half of every working day to painting. After he moved into the top floor of an apartment building he designed himself, his studio and his home became one. In that apartment, clad on the outside in the most fashionable glass products of the day, the studio's back wall — in contrast to the modern, minimalist design of the living quarters — kept the rough fieldstone masonry used for the partition walls between the neighborhood's apartments, and, constrained by a roofline set back according to the surrounding block's building heights, Corbusier used vaulting to maximize the studio's volume, giving it something of a primitive, cave-like quality along with the flavor of Mediterranean vernacular architecture. Painting freely in that setting brought Corbusier's mind a step closer to Rousseau's primitive state. Corbusier worked in his studio in the mornings, then took the subway, a taxi, or drove to his office at the Jesuit monastery on rue de Sèvres, arriving promptly at 2 p.m. and heading home for dinner at 7. Coming from a country famous for clocks, Corbusier held himself to strict discipline around time: up at 6 a.m., calisthenics and a few small sketches, then after breakfast, time spent outlining the afternoon's work for his assistants, or starting some writing, before pouring the largest block of time into the painting he was most passionate about. This routine reversed as he aged — he began going to the office in the morning and coming home to paint after noon. Corbusier said: "Everyone thinks I'm just an architect; no one wants to think of me as a painter. But the truth is, it was through painting that I discovered architecture." That remark points to the constant thread running through the ceaseless back-and-forth between his painting and his architecture: the same problem he was thinking through in both. When he couldn't work something out in architectural space, he'd take it to the canvas to think it over — and the anguish his architectural work put him through gradually found healing there too.

Poetry, music, painting, sculpture, architecture — every art form has the boundaries of what it can express, and when a thought cannot be fully articulated within one art's territory, crossing the threshold into another to speak becomes only natural. In that sense, Corbusier's hard labor across both painting and architecture also earned him rewards others couldn't dare hope for. The painting in his buildings belonged to him, not to other specialists. Painters in Paris complained that Corbusier gave them no chance to collaborate, because he took on nearly all the murals himself. In volume 4 (1938–1946) of The Complete Works of Le Corbusier, paintings begin appearing alongside architectural works, and in a short essay titled "The Synthesis of the Major Arts: Architecture, Painting, and Sculpture," Corbusier wrote: "Around 1910, painting underwent a historic upheaval through Cubism. Since then, an art of the highest constructive, plastic, and intellectual value has developed. There is no doubt that this art, so different from Impressionism, is a synthesis leading toward architecture. The same evolution holds in sculpture. But do not mistake this for applied art! Strictly speaking, this is the beginning of the plastic age." In this volume, published during the hardest years of the Nazi occupation, Corbusier signed himself "Le Corbusier, Painter." And on those pages, he brazenly included the several murals he'd painted, without the owner's permission, at Eileen Gray's Côte d'Azur villa E-1027, writing with a certain shamelessness that they weren't painted on the villa's best walls — quite the opposite: they burst forth from walls that were dim, mournful, and had "nothing going on." The result, he wrote, was meaningful painting on mediocre walls, while the good white walls stayed perfectly intact. Corbusier's freewheeling graffiti in 1939 landed him in a small lawsuit with Gray, and in the end most of the murals were chiseled away — which makes the photographs preserved in the book all the more precious.

Cover image: Wikipedia; in-body images: Post Wave Publishing