LE CORBUSIER

For sixty years, Le Corbusier used a wide variety of media to explore the themes and forms of his art, ranging from drawing to urbanism and including painting, architecture, and sculpture. He first discovered tapestry in 1936, in response to a request from Marie Cuttoli, who was then commissioning artworks woven in a factory in Aubusson from modern painters. However, it was twelve years later that he expressed his interest in producing woven artworks based on his drawings and found his way to this city in central France, where a true renaissance of tapestry had begun, at the initiative of Jean Lurçat and Jean Picart Le Doux.

His interest in this art form serves as a response to the challenge posed to architects by Fernand Léger, who had blamed them for ‘radically imposing’ their ‘smooth’ and ‘new’ surfaces. Le Corbusier came to believe that ‘by its texture, its material, by the reality of its production,’ tapestry ‘brings its own warmth to an interior,’ as he wrote in 1962 to Pierre Baudouin, a young professor at the art school in Aubusson. Starting in 1948, Baudouin allowed him to transpose some of his Purist compositions of the 1920s and to echo the assemblages of objects ‘with poetic reaction’ that had followed.

Press release courtesy Almine Rech. Text: Jean-Louis Cohen.