Curator, Barry Bergdoll: Long before he adopted the name Le Corbusier, he was Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, from a small Swiss town known for its watch-making industry. As a teenager, he studied art so one day he could work as an engraver of watchcases. This landscape of the Jura mountains, drawn when he was 15 years old, features the confident lines of an engraver-to-be. Curator Jean-Louis Cohen:
Architect, Jean-Louis Cohen: When you're engraving a gold case, you better not miss a line. And this precision is something that his early drawings reveal.
The Jura landscape was not very high peaks, but plateaus and rather smooth mountains.
The first landscape drawing we know of Le Corbusier in a way announces his lifelong interest for vegetation, for mountains, for the contrast between built objects and the spectacle of nature. We see already how the very young apprentice is responding to the question of the open spaces. In short, how his system for observing the wide world is taking shape.