Le Corbusier: Catalogue des dessins, 1929-1939 (tome III)
Danièle Pauly
Fondation Le Corbusier & AAM Éditions, 2025
€120,00
Between October 1902 and May 1965, Le Corbusier produced several thousand drawings, often of rare beauty. Some 5,000 of them are kept at the Le Corbusier Foundation and the others in private and public collections. A catalogue raisonné in 4 volumes is in the making.
Volume III covers the years 1929 to 1939, a period during which his drawings and paintings were almost exclusively devoted to the female form. The initial phase (1929–1932) saw the artist exploring the formal richness and poetry of elements found in nature—such as shells, roots, bones, bark, and flint—or of everyday objects repurposed and sometimes combined with organic elements (matchboxes, glass bricks, etc.), which he termed “objects of poetic reaction.”
Throughout the decade—a period he referred to in terms of his artistic output as the “women period”—female themes inspired him daily: his partner Yvonne; the performer Joséphine Baker; indigenous women encountered during trips to Latin America; Moorish women seen on North African journeys; female bathers and fisherwomen observed during stays in the Arcachon Basin; as well as dancers, female wrestlers, giantesses, female duos, and countless nudes.
This was a time when Le Corbusier devoted himself intensely to painting, dedicating half his days to the craft and producing some 156 paintings—double the output of his Purist period. Each painting was preceded by a series of preparatory studies that shed light on his creative process. The artist described this body of drawings and paintings as “secret labor,” a body of work he did not reveal to the public until the end of the decade, in a major 1938 exhibition at the Kunsthaus in Zurich. (IN FRANS)
ISBN: 9782488271073
