Nature morte au violon rouge

Details

With a confirmation from Eric Mouchet, Paris, dated 2 April 2024, with the number 24-052.

Provenance:

Roggio Andreini (1906-1996), Paris, employee at the Atelier Le Corbusier;

Vieri Andreini (1915-2007), brother of the aforementioned;

Private collection, France, by inheritance from the aforementioned;

Private collection, Paris, acquired from the aforementioned.

Descrizione

– Rare painterly work by the world-famous architect Le Corbusier

– From the important work phase around 1920, which is characterised by his intensive engagement with Cubism

– Detailed, fine study of the oil painting of the same name, which is in the Fondation Le Corbusier in Paris

The Swiss architect Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris, world-famous under his pseudonym Le Corbusier, is less well known for his paintings and drawings. However, just like his architecture, his artistic work is characterised by his interest in the tectonics of motifs, coupled with a great wealth of imagination. The gouache “Nature morte au violon rouge” is a study for the oil painting of the same name, which is in the Fondation Le Corbusier in Paris. Like all his early works, Le Corbusier signed this gouache with his real name “jeanneret”. After moving to Paris in 1917, where he met the painter Amédée Ozenfant, he became intensively involved with contemporary painting and Cubism. He and Ozenfant exhibited their first paintings in 1918 and published their manifesto “Après le Cubisme”. The magazine “L’Esprit Nouveau”, founded in 1920 together with the poet Paul Dermée, also served to publicise their ideas on painting and architecture. He began to use the pseudonym Le Corbusier as an author in this magazine for the first time, and in 1923 these articles were collected and published in the book “Vers une Architecture”. It is precisely these principles – a rational geometric pictorial composition and the avoidance of decorative elements – that later characterise Le Corbusier’s architecture and make it unmistakable to this day.