Preface

Preiswerk-Lösel, Eva-Maria

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Preface

Eva-Maria Preiswerk-Lösel

Description: Le Corbusier Before Le Corbusier: Applied Arts, Architecture, Painting, and...

Le Corbusier Before Le Corbusier: Applied Arts, Architecture, Painting, and Photography, 1907–1922

~~The early work of Le Corbusier in its various aspects has never before been exhibited outside La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland, where he was born Charles-Edouard Jeanneret in 1887. Between 1907 and 1923, with no formal training, he learned his trade, and defined his position as architect and artist, and in 1920 he adopted the name...

Author

Eva-Maria Preiswerk-Lösel

PublisherBard Graduate Center

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-22003

Preface

The early work of Le Corbusier in its various aspects has never before been exhibited outside La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland, where he was born Charles-Edouard Jeanneret in 1887. Between 1907 and 1923, with no formal training, he learned his trade, and defined his position as architect and artist, and in 1920 he adopted the name Le Corbusier. While his architecture and ideas on urban design from 1920 to 1960 profoundly influenced the concepts of construction and city planning for decades, he was always strangely reticent about his background and early career. Nonetheless, before moving to Paris in 1917 he had built six private houses and a cinema, and designed furnishings and interiors.

Photographs and sketches record Le Corbusier’s travels, studying and immersing himself in Europe’s cultural heritage. This was the premise for his revolutionary later work. Watercolors and early pictures—some not previously exhibited—indicate an interest in the aesthetic preoccupation of the avant-garde at that time: not only Matisse, Munch, and Signac, but also Cézanne and Braque. His early career as architect and interior designer in the tradition of neoclassicism is illustrated by drawings, sketches, architect’s models, photographs, and rare wood furniture together with a digital model specially prepared for this exhibition.

We are pleased that this exhibition has engendered international interest, and in a slightly enlarged form will transfer from the Langmatt Museum in Baden, Switzerland, to the renowned Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture, New York. Located in distinguished houses from around 1900, both establishments are able to present the exhibition in the comforting ambience of former homes; an elegant New York town house, and the Villa Langmatt set in a large garden in rural Baden. We wish to thank the staff at Bard Graduate Center, which has pursued in exemplary fashion the study and presentation of applied art, for their trust and close collaboration, especially founder and director Susan Weber Soros. Our particular thanks go to exhibition director Nina Stritzler-Levine and her team for coordinating the exhibition and tending to the creation of this catalogue. Everyone engaged on this complex project has shown extraordinary commitment to its success.

For the preparation and selection of the early work we extend thanks to Stanislaus von Moos, professor of modern and contemporary art at Zürich University, and to Arthur Rüegg, architect and professor of architecture at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), Zürich. With many publications and a number of exhibitions, including L’Esprit Nouveau: Le Corbusier und die Industrie, 1920–1925 (1987), these two curators have long made their mark internationally as Le Corbusier scholars.

Our thanks are equally due to our patrons and sponsors. The exhibition in Baden has been aided by the Friends of the Langmatt Museum, Baden; UBS AG, Aargau; Boner Stiftung für Kunst und Kultur, Davos; Axpo Holding, Zürich; Artephila Stiftung; Vontobel-Stiftung, Zürich; Andersen / Arthur Andersen, The Global Professional Services Firm; Möbel-Transport AG, Zürich.

The museum housed in the Villa Langmatt in Baden was inaugurated in 1990. In the setting of the original domestic interior, with French furniture of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it houses a permanent collection of exquisite French Impressionists accumulated from 1908 onward by industrialist Sidney Brown-Sulzer and his wife Jenny. The museum’s additional annual exhibitions have hitherto been held with partners in French-speaking Switzerland and in Germany. This is the first transatlantic coproduction. It is our hope that this glimpse into the origins of the “Architect of the Twentieth Century,” as Le Corbusier was called in a 1987 exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in London, will generate new interest both in Europe and the United States.

Eva-Maria Preiswerk-Lösel
Curator, The Langmatt Museum

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