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The show
Le Corbusier is not only the greatest architect of the twentieth 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 lesson of Picasso and Léger, a synthetic language of great power and suggestion. At the basis of his work as a painter lies a very rich and still little known graphic production, within which the collection of drawings preserved by Costantino Nivola has a particular significance.
From a corpus of over 300 works, this exhibition selects 64, bringing together for the first time the segments of the collection now divided between Europe and America. Born from a joint project of the Foundation of Sardinia and the Nivola Foundation within the "AR / S - Shared Art in Sardinia" cycle, with the support of the Department of Tourism, Crafts and Commerce of the Region of Sardinia and thanks to the important collaboration of the Fondation Le Corbusier, the exhibition explores on the one hand the creative universe of the master of the Modern, on the other it sheds light on an episode in his biography - the relationship with Costantino Nivola - full of consequences on various aspects of his work.
Le Corbusier and Nivola
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, meets Nivola and establishes a friendship with him destined to last his entire life. The younger artist's studio in Greenwich Village and his Long Island home, where Corbu is a frequent guest, offer a welcome refuge from the tensions that accompany his work with the United Nations team.
Corbu's teaching is crucial for Nivola, who approaches modernism, abandoning his previous expressionist style. The drawings that Le Corbusier brought with him from Paris or made to America will constitute for him a vademecum of ideas and formal solutions, but above all an example of design rigor and creative freedom. Through those sheets Nivola will remember having learned "the rules of the game, the most beautiful game that man has ever invented, the game of art".
The game of form
The path opens with drawings and studies of the purist phase, in which the young Le Corbusier develops a sober and rigorous graphic system, based on the geometricization of a repertoire of everyday objects. The theme of the still life is the starting point of an analysis in which forms, like words in a dictionary, become elements of a visual grammar. Many years later, in New York, Le Corbusier made the “still life” of Nivola's dining table a tool through which to teach how to see. The large study on the theme of “coffee pots” from the double date “New York 1927-1947” ideally links the two moments.
The metamorphosis of the figure
The human figure, absent in the purist period, appears in Le Corbusier's work from the end of the 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 beginnings to the aggressive and disturbing ones of the early 1940s. Faces and bodies pass from recognizable features to radical stylization, to violent and almost monstrous deformations. The theme of the half-length figure, already addressed at the end of the 1920s, develops in the following decades in different series such as that of the Athlete or the Guardian Angel of the Cathedral of Sens.
The female nude
The female nude is omnipresent in the art of the twentieth century, both traditional and avant-garde. Le Corbusier is no exception, on the contrary: for him the woman represents an authentic obsession, the image of the “other” in relation to which to build one's own identity. It is not surprising that the theme emerges decisively in his painting after his trip to Algiers in 1931. His is a look which - characterized by the most classic “orientalist” attitude - at the same time distances and myths. His women, powerful and voluptuous, are both emanations of the sacredness of nature and bodies object of male desire.
Icon
A place in itself in the collection is occupied by 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, among which the splendid 1946 canvas also belonging to Nivola, which recently appeared at Sotheby's auction, stands out. The majestic female figure is a portrait of Le Corbusier's wife, Yvonne Gallis, the most important woman in her life. Le Corbusier represents her with a lighted candle, a symbol of the home of which she is the guardian, but also an allusion to her sexual power.
Talking walls
In September 1950 Le Corbusier, once again a guest of Nivola, created a mural on two contiguous walls in the Long Island house. The theme of mural painting had begun to interest him as early as the 1930s; Springs' paintings summarize some characteristic themes of the research he conducted during the war years. Starting from the suggestion of found objects such as pebbles and stripped bones (the "objects with poetic reaction"), Corbu had developed compositions with a surrealist flavor in sculpture and painting, baptized with the names of Ozon (from the country of the Pyrenees where he was refugee during the Nazi occupation of Paris), Ubu and Panurge (from the characters of Alfred Jarry and Fra- nçois Rabelais). This section hosts drawings that prepare the mural and others related to the themes that are represented there.
With Le Corbusier. Lessons in modernism, the Foundation of Sardinia and the Nivola museum celebrate the crucial meeting 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 architecture and art of the twentieth century.
