Trois nus féminins allongés, 1935, signed and dated lower right : Le Corbusier juin 35 ; Salubra wallpaper on plywood-mounted paper ; 51,2 x 86,4 cm (detail) ; coll. Fondation Le Corbusier ; photo © coll. Fondation Le Corbusier ; © Adagp, Paris, 2015 14th November 2015 – 24th January 2016 2015–24th 14th November The DrawingGame Le Corbusier Musée Picasso, Antibes Musée Picasso, press kit press Le Corbusier, The Drawing Game 14th november 2015 – 24th january 2016 Musée Picasso, Antibes The exhibition is organised by the Musée Picasso, Antibes with the support of the Fondation Le Corbusier and in partnership with the Kunstmuseum, Münster.. academic advisor: Danièle Pauly Extract of the exhibition’s catalog Le Corbusier was famously fond of his draw-ings, which he kept conserve and make known this vast heritage, whose inventory – meticulously stored in two watch cabinets originally in the family entrusted first to Françoise de Franclieu, then to Danièle Pauly home in La Chaux-de-Fonds. Apart from a few major works like La – has made possible a long and detailed study of the drawings. Cheminée (The Mantelpiece), over the years he exhibited them spa- Many of the contributors to this catalogue – both distinguished ringly and rarely. In comparison, then, with the international public ‘Corbusians’ and young researchers – have been part of this ‘pa- he found as architect, theorist and even painter, the audience for tient research’. his drawings was fairly limited; they remained his ‘secret task’, at The Antibes exhibition, makes it clear that in the arts, too, Le once an intimate per- sonal zone and the key to his explorations. Corbusier played a very real part in the making of twentieth-cen- Among the Le Corbusier retrospectives of recent decades, tury modernity. In this respect the invitation from the directors those devoted exclusively to his graphic work are very much the of the two Picasso museums marks a high point in the 2015 art exception: in their great majority the works on show here have calendar. The welcoming of these drawings in Antibes into this been seldom or never shown. All of them come from the Fonda- setting so dear to Picasso, and then in Münster, is a symbolic ges- tion Le Corbusier, holder of the greater part of the corpus – some ture the foundation greatly appreciates. 6,500 works in all. The foundation’s mission has been to classify, Antoine Picon, président de la Fondation Le Corbusier « Je rêvais », 1960 ;indian ink on vellum; signed and dated lower left: L_C Chandigarh 28/10/60 ; 68,5 x 102 cm Pablo Picasso and Le Corbusier visiting the Unité d’Habitation in Marseille, september 1949 The Drawing Game ‘Drawing is a game, too . I’ve always drawn. Landscapes, buil- dings, glasses and bottles in bars, bladders I took for lanterns, seashells, rocks, bones from the butcher’s, pebbles, small wo- men, all sorts of animals – these are the phases, the keys.’ Thus, in 1965, the year of his accidental death, did Le Corbu- sier sum up the favourite subjects of his work on paper. And they are all there in the selection of drawings lent by the Fondation Le Corbusier for the exhibition presented at the Picasso museums in Antibes and Münster to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Charles-Édouard Jeanneret. The ‘drawing addiction’ he fell victim to very young would remain with him all his life: ob- viously in his work as an architect, for which, he said, ‘The drawing itself is a witness. An impartial witness and a driving force for the works of the creator’; but also in the more personal explorations linked to his parallel practices of painting and sculpture. In this respect, his acquaintance with Picasso’s work certainly played its part: one thinks, for example, of such eminently Picasso the- mes in his visual work as the bull and the Minotaur; the little owl in the lithographs accompanying The Poem of the Right Angle; the generously endowed bodies of his giantesses, harking back to Picasso’s Neo-Classical bathers; and the occasional summo- ning of Eros – Picasso was fond of this too – in those female and male nudes ready to taste ‘the pleasures of love’. Nor should we omit, among the assorted objects Le Corbusier found and kept as sources of inspiration – stones, pebbles, shells, bits of bark or wood or glass – the stove burner that might have been a tribute to Picasso’s La Vénus du gaz [Venus of Gas] of 1945. This interest led the young architect to make contact with Picasso, and between 1920 and 1961 – when he sent birthday wishes to the older man, who had just turned eighty – he got in touch on a number of occasions. In July 1942, after viewing some paintings in the studio on Rue des Grands-Augustins, he wrote to him: ‘Picasso, you are the Nu féminin lisant, 1932 ; pencil, coloured ink and watercolour on paper; happiest of men in your old house. And you have every right to be!’ unsigned, dated lower right: 1932; 74 x 53 cm One of their most significant encounters was surely the guided tour he offered Picasso and his then com- panion Françoise Gilot, in 1949, of the Unité d’Habitation in Marseille. In July 1965, a few weeks before his death, Le Corbusier wrote, This exhibition has been organised in partnership with the Fonda- ‘With the passing of the years I have become a man of everywhere. tion Le Corbusier, which kindly agreed to lend all the works on show. I have travelled the continents. Yet I have only one deep attach- We should like to express our gratitude to the foundation’s president, ment: the Mediterranean. I am a Mediterranean, and very strongly Antoine Picon, its director Michel Richard, and Isabelle Godineau, in so. Mediterra- nean, queen of form and light. Light and space.’ charge of exhibitions. Our warm thanks also go to Danièle Pauly, ar- Today another Mediterranean welcomes him in Anti- bes, on chitecture historian, specialist in the field of Le Corbusier’s drawings, the shore of that ancient sea where he breathed his last, and in and academic adviser for the exhibition and the catalogue. Nor Münster. And may he be happy there, for he too has every right to be! should we forget the authors whose contributions to the cata- Jean-Louis Andral, directeur du musée Picasso, Antibes & Markus logue are crucial to an understanding of the Le Corbusier oeuvre. Müller, directeur du Kunstmuseum Pablo Picasso, Münster Trois nus féminins allongés, 1935 ; gouache, Salubra wallpaper on plywood-mounted paper; signed and dated lower right: Le Corbusier juin 35 ; 51,2 x 86,4 cm ‘I drew with delight and desire’ In art the theme can be, or can remain, secret, or may be revealed the act of drawing: ‘For the artist drawing is the sole possible only to someone who has sought out, discovered, invented the guiding means of devoting himself without restriction to studying mat- thread, or a guiding thread . be it their own or that of the artist. ters of taste and expressions of beauty and emotion. Drawing is . ‘I was so happy, so calm, so at ease. And I drew, with delight . the means of using what he wants to observe and understand, and desire.’ Thus the future Le Corbusier in the spring of 1917, and then transform and express . Drawing is a game, too . just after the definitive move to Paris. Since childhood he had al- I’ve always drawn. Landscapes, buildings, glasses and bottles in most never been without pencil and paper, or notebook; drawing bars, bladders I took for lanterns, seashells, rocks, bones from the was a daily activity, a tool for observation, analysis and research butcher’s, pebbles, small women, all sorts of animals – these are that crystallised his creative process. It became, too, as the years the phases, the keys . The work of art is a game. You make up the passed, an expression of his inwardness and the pleasure he took rules of your own game. But the rule has to be clear to the others in things. Last but far from least it was, as he never tired of repea- who want to play too. The drawing bears witness to the rules.’ ting, ‘a game’. Shortly before his death he spoke at length about In a talk given in Rome in 1936, Le Corbusier stated a principle for an organisation of architectural space based on a playful notion of perception and appropriation. As the instigator of this spatial game, he urged the user to join in, to discover in it perspectives and entries and to spot variations of proportion or modulations of light: ‘The game being played emerges. You walk, you circulate, endlessly on the move, endlessly turning . It’s [one’s] promenade and circulation that count, that trigger architectural events.’ In a book on his visual art published in 1938, he evokes the same concept, comparing the artwork to ‘a game for which the artist has laid down rules . made up of suffi- ciently intelligent signs’: signs or objects ‘lending themselves to reco- gnition as a simple diagram’ as do, for example, the ordinary, everyday objects of the first still lifes, composed in the early 1920s. It was as a colourist that the youthful Jeanneret made his first trip to Italy in 1907. The watercolour drawings and architectural views from that period, then from Germany and during the journey eastwar- ds in 1911, are marked by the chromatic daring and anti- academic streak that would earn them a mixed, not to say hostile reception when he showed them in Neuchâtel in the spring of 1912: ‘I painted a Parthenon in emerald green and vermilion.