An original and unexpected Le Corbusier is on display in Sardinia

From Dec. 22, 2018, to March 17, 2019, the Nivola Museum in Orani, Nuoro, Italy, will host the exhibition Le Corbusier. Lessons in Modernism.
Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris, La Chaux-de-Fonds, 1887 - Roccabruna, 1965) is not only one of the greatest architects of the 20th century, but also an exceptional visual artist, who, starting from the geometries of the Purist period (from 1918 to the second half of the 1920s), developed, through contact with the Surrealist atmosphere and the lessons of Picasso and Léger, a synthetic language of great power and suggestion. Underlying his work as a painter is a very rich and still little-known graphic production, within which the collection of drawings preserved by Costantino Nivola is of special significance.

From a corpus of more than 300 works, this exhibition selects 64, bringing together for the first time segments of the collection now divided between Europe and America. Born out of a joint project of the Fondazione di Sardegna and the Fondazione Nivola as part of the AR/S - Shared Art in Sardinia cycle, with the support of the Region of Sardinia ’s Department of Tourism, Crafts and Trade and thanks to theimportant collaboration of the Fondation Le Corbusier, the exhibition explores on the one hand the creative universe of the master of the Modern, and on the other sheds light on an episode in his biography (his relationship with Costantino Nivola) that is rich in consequences for different aspects of his work.

In 1946 Le Corbusier, in New York as a member of the international team of architects in charge of the design of the United Nations Building, met Nivola and formed a friendship with him that was destined to last a lifetime. The younger artist’s studio in Greenwich Village and his Long Island home, where Corbu is often a guest, provide a welcome refuge from the tensions that accompany his work with the United Nations team.

Corbu’s teaching is instrumental for Nivola as he approaches modernism, abandoning his earlier expressionist style. The drawings that Le Corbusier brings with him from Paris or makes in America will constitute for him a vademecum of cues and formal solutions, but above all an example of design rigor and creative freedom. Through those papers Nivola will remember learning “the rules of the game, the most beautiful game that man has ever invented, the game of art.”

The itinerary opens with drawings and studies from the purist phase, in which the young Le Corbusier developed a sober and rigorous graphic system based on the geometrization of a repertoire of everyday objects. The still life theme is the starting point of an analysis in which forms, like words in a vocabulary, become elements of a visual grammar. Many years later, in New York, Le Corbusier will make the “still life” of Nivola’s dining table a tool through which to teach seeing. The large Study on the theme of “coffee pots” from the double date “New York 1927-1947” ideally reconnects the two moments.

The human figure, absent in the Purist period, appears in Le Corbusier’s work beginning in the late 1920s. Through the drawings collected in this section, it is possible to follow the transformations of the human presence from the balanced and harmonious geometries of the early days to the aggressive and disturbing ones of the early 1940s. Faces and bodies move from recognizable features to radical stylization, to violent and almost monstrous deformations. The theme of the half-length figure, addressed as early as the late 1920s, developed in the following decades in series as diverse as theAthlete or theGuardian Angel of Sens Cathedral.

The female nude is ubiquitous in twentieth-century art, both traditional and avant-garde. Le Corbusier is no exception, indeed: for him, woman represents a genuine obsession, the image of the “other” in relation to which to construct one’s identity. It is not surprising that the theme emerges decisively in his painting after his trip to Algiers in 1931. It is a gaze, his, that - connoted by the most classic “Orientalist” attitude - at the same time distances and mythicizes. His women, powerful and voluptuous, are both emanations of the sacredness of nature and bodies that are objects of male desire.

A place of its own in the collection occupies the theme of the “woman with a lie,” also called “Icon” by Le Corbusier. The series of drawings, executed in New York, prepares a group of paintings of the same title, including the splendid 1946 canvas also belonging to Nivola, which recently appeared at auction at Sotheby’s. The majestic female figure is a portrait of Le Corbusier’s wife, Yvonne Gallis, the most important woman in his life. Le Corbusier depicts her with a burning candle, a symbol of the domestic hearth of which she is the guardian, but also an allusion to her sexual power.

In September 1950 Le Corbusier, once again a guest of Nivola, created a mural on two adjoining walls in the Long Island house. The theme of mural painting had begun to interest him since the 1930s; the Springs paintings summarize some of the themes characteristic of his research during the war years. Starting with the suggestion of found objects such as pebbles and stripped bones (the “poetic reaction objects”), Corbu had developed in sculpture and painting compositions with a surrealist flavor, baptized by the names of Ozon (from the Pyrenean village where he took refuge during the Nazi occupation of Paris), Ubu and Panurge (from the characters of Alfred Jarry and François Rabelais). This section houses drawings preparing the mural and others related to the themes depicted in it.

In 1951, on the beach of Long Island, Le Corbusier experimented on the example of Nivola with the technique of sandcasting (plaster cast from a sand matrix), with which he made some sculptures. This experience is evidenced in the exhibition by two bronzes taken from the now lost sandcasts, one of which depicts the Main ouverte, the open hand symbolizing peace, prosperity and communion among men. The experiments conducted on sandcasting fit among the research on plastic forms and the relationship between sculpture and architecture begun in the early 1940s that would find expression in the buildings of the 1950s.

With Le Corbusier. Lessons in Modernism, the Fondazione di Sardegna and the Nivola Museum celebrate the crucial encounter in Nivola’s life as an artist and at the same time offer the public a significant and still little-known aspect of the work of Le Corbusier, one of the giants of twentieth-century architecture and art. For all information you can visit the official website of the Nivola Museum.

An original and unexpected Le Corbusier is on display in Sardinia

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