PRESS KIT LE CORBUSIER AND LÉGER POLYCHROMATIC CONVERSATION 20.05 > 24.09.17 La Première Rue Cité radieuse Le Corbusier 131, Résidence Le Corbusier - Briey-en-Forêt centrepompidou-metz.fr #visionspolychromes In partnership with the association La Première Rue and le Val de Briey and with the generous support of the Fondation Le Corbusier. La Val de Briey Première Façade polychrome de "La Cité Radieuse" Le Corbusier de Briey-en-Forêt © F.I.C. / ADAGP, Paris, 2017. Photo Pascal Volpez Rue LE CORBUSIER ET LÉGER POLYCHROMATIC CONVERSATION 1. EXHIBITION OVERVIEW LE CORBUSIER AND LÉGER POLYCHROMATIC CONVERSATIONS From May the 20th to September the 24th Cité radieuse Le Corbusier - Briey-en-Forêt As a dialogue to the retrospective Fernand Léger. Beauty is all around at the Centre Pompidou-Metz, the exhibition Le Corbusier and Léger presented at the Cité Radieuse in Briey is an invitation to rediscover this iconic Le Corbusier building situated forty minutes away from Metz. The exhibition conceived in partnership with La Première Rue and le Val de Briey has benefited from generous financial help from the Le Corbusier Foundation. The exhibition links the architects thinking to that of the painter, revealing their long friendship marked by a common celebration of colour. After having discovered the region on the front at Verdun during the First World War, it was in the Briey basin , in 1940 that Fernand Léger imagined the setting for an aviation centre open to all. This project of aeronautic democratisation, interrupted by the war, struck a chord with Le Corbusier who had a passion for what he called “flying machines”. Some years later it was the architect’s turn to explore the Lorraine region with an experiment in polychromy as part of the construction of the factory in Saint Dié, before working on his housing estate in Briey in the 1950’s. Le Corbusier, Maison La Roche, 1923 Léger and Le Corbusier met at the café La Rotonde in Montparnasse in © Fondation Le Corbusier, Paris © Adagp 2017 1920, year in which the review L’Esprit Nouveau initiated by the architext and painter Amédée Ozenfant and open to a broad spectrum of interests listed on the front cover : “architecture, painting, music, pure and applied sciences, experimental aesthetics, engineering aesthetics, urbanism, philosophy, economic sociology, moral and political sciences, modern life, theatre, performing arts, sports news”. Fernand Léger contributed sporadically to the publication : in a programme dedicated to the painter, Le Corbusier looked back on this critical juncture : “ We had become good friends. From Jeaanneret I had become Le Corbusier and we used the familiar “tu” form. In 1925 he invited Léger to hang a canvas in his pavilion of the Esprit Nouveau on the occasion of the International Exhibition of Decorative Arts.For the International Exhibition of Arts and Modern Technology in 1937, Léger contributed to Le Corbusier’s Temps nouveaux Pavilion with the production of a monumental photomontage. Even if they only collaborated a few times, their exchanges influenced in a decisive manner the role they attached to polychromy in their respective projects. Fernand Léger, apprentice from 16 years old in an architect’s firm, had very early on developed an interest for this discipline.Convinced by the interdisciplinarity of the arts, he worked actively in favour of a “threeway understanding”, between the wall, the architect and the painter. “How can we create a feeling of space, a pushing back of limits? Simply with colour, by walls of different colours(…)Colour is a powerful means of action, it can destroy a wall, can it embellish it can push it back or bring it forward, it creates a new space”he maintained. Animated by the same desire for colour Le Corbusier considered in his Almanac of Modern Architecture that “ completely white, the house would be a pot of cream.” Thanks to a rich collection of archival material – reviews, films, photographs, correspondence, etc. – a number of their projects linking architecture and painting, often little known have been brought to light. Curators : Elia Biezunski, Special assignement manager for the Director of Centre Pompidou-Metz Anne Horvath, In charge of coordination and research at Centre Pompidou-Metz 2 LE CORBUSIER ET LÉGER POLYCHROMATIC CONVERSATION 2. LA PREMIÈRE RUE À LA CITÉ RADIEUSE DE BRIEY-EN-FORÊT Le Corbusier, La rue intérieure du premier étage de l’unité d'habitation de Briey-en-Forêt © photographe Pascal Volpez © Association La Première Rue © Adagp 2017 The association La Première Rue was born in 1989 out of the patronage of around thirty architects and artists wishing to contribute to the protection and the development of this major work of modern architectural patrimony : The housing estate at Briey-en-Forêt, designed by Le Corbusier and inaugurated in 1961. The association makes a contribution, through exhibitions, performances, conferences and guided visits of the site to the notoriety of modern architecture on both a local and international level.It also enables school groups students architects, researchers and the general public to gain deeper access to Le Corbusier’s work and to broaden their knowledge of it. Every year, La Première Rue organises its Galerie Blanche : several temporary exhibitions devoted to the history of modern and contemporary architecture and to the visual arts. Briey is situated about 30 kilometres from Metz, about one hundred kilometers from Nancy and fifty kilometers from Luxemburg. 3 LE CORBUSIER ET LÉGER POLYCHROMATIC CONVERSATION 3. EXHIBITION LAYOUT I.COLOUR COORDINATED WITH FORM "Architectural polychromy takes possession of the entire wall, and delivers it with the power of blood, or the freshness of the meadow or the radience of the sun and of the sea.What forces at our disposal!" Le Corbusier, conference in Rome 1936 "A plain wall is a dead surface. A coloured wall becomes a living surface." Fernand Léger, L’architecture moderne et la couleur, 1951 Fernand Léger, Projet décoratif pour music-hall et projet de fresque (extérieur) pour un hall d'hôtel, 1922 © Bibliothèque de la Cité de l'Architecture et du Patrimoine. © Adagp, Paris, 2017 The visit by Le Corbusier and Léger to the exhibition of the group of architects of De Stijl at the Galerie de l’Effort Moderne in 1923, marks a turning point in their reflection on architectural polychromy. The models – notably that for the private home by Cornelius van Eesteren – which they discovered organise the space according to the relationships and plans of colours around a central axe. Le Corbusier starts a controversy by asserting that colour can only apply to monochrome plans and not mark the space of a same wall with different tints. Later on, the architect and the painter formulated theories on the power of each colour : whereas a light blue wall pushes back, a black wall will bring forward and a yellow wall will make disappear. Léger defines this transformation therefore as the "liveable rectangle" becoming an "elastic rectangle". 4 LE CORBUSIER ET LÉGER POLYCHROMATIC CONVERSATION II. LA COULEUR EN LIBERTÉ Fernand Léger, Charlotte Perriand, Joies essentielles, plaisirs nouveaux, 1937 © Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid © Adagp, Paris, 2017 “[TheBattle of free colour”] consists, after a number of trys, of accepting a colour-value, a blue, a red, a yellow as a value in its own right, like an object-value.” Fernand Léger, De la peinture murale, 1952 “I accept the fresco not as a means of embellishing the wall but on the contrary as a means of turbulently destroying the wall, taking away from it all notion of stability and of weight.” Le Corbusier, Lettre à Victor Nekrassov, Paris, December the 20th 1932 Whereas Le Corbusier’s first polychromatic architectural projects subordinated painting to architecture, colour little by little gained in autonomy from the beginning of the 1930’s. The architect diversifies his range of colour shades occasionally allowing himself the use of different colour combinations sometimes independent of the building plan and of its geographical orientation. Léger and Le Corbusier used the strength of colour to conquor uniformity and breathe life and emotion into architecture.When the colours extend as far as the dimension of the fresco, they acquire the capacity to obliterate the wall, opening up a new totally free space, beyond architecture. III. COLOUR AND UTOPIA "Paris all white” and the evening aeroplanes and projectors flood the city with vivid and moving colours. Why not?" Fernand Léger, Un nouvel espace en architecture, 1949 “This is what gives our dreams audacity : they can come true” Le Corbusier, Urbanisme, 1925 Fernand Léger and Le Corbusier, like numerous artists of their time, dreamt of a new world and saw in colour a possible means of breathing joy and well being into the city.”This light-colour action doesn’t just have an external value, asserted Fernand Léger in 1946, by developing rationally, it can transform a society.” The painter and the architect attribute psychological, curative and spiritual virtues to colour. Beyond the power that it can exercise on the individual, they considered that its action could assume a political and social dimension and extend as far as urbanism. Fernand Léger imagined polychrome streets for Moscow, attempted a response to the excessiveness of Manhattan by the setting in motion of architecture and elaborated studies for a polychrome village designed by André Bruyère in Biot. In turn in 1925 Le Corbusier makes an appeal to every citizen “ to Le Corbusier, Plafond de l’usine Claude et Duval de replace their wall coverings, their damask, their wall paper, their stencils Saint-Dié-des-Vosges, 1950 by a coat of pure white Ripolin (gloss paint) in order to spread the joy of © photographe Olivier Martin Gambier, 2005 living and the joy action,”.In the context of reconstruction after the war, © Adagp,2017 he built “cité radieuses” (housing estates) “habitat machines” rational and standardised where colour was at the service of an ideal design.