Curator, Barry Bergdoll: Even though he is known primarily as an architect, Le Corbusier always saw himself as both a painter and an architect.
Architect, Jean-Louis Cohen: Le Corbusier said: “painting is my secret laboratory”. Without this secret research, /his architecture would never have emerged.
Barry Bergdoll: That’s evident in this work from 1918, called “La Cheminee,”--the fireplace—his first foray into oil painting.
Jean-Louis Cohen: What we see is the upper part of a fireplace on which a rather mysterious white cube, is located beneath a pile of books.
Barry Bergdoll: By the time he made this work, Le Corbusier had travelled to Greece to visit its ancient ruins. Here he explores the relationship and tension between classical architectural motifs and the clean spare lines of modern architecture.
Curator Jean-Louis Cohen: He will explicitly connect the white cube on top of the fireplace with the Parthenon he had so admired in Athens. And one also sees the classical molding at the bottom left. A confirmation that the iconoclastic modern architecture had a very solid and very firm classical culture.
Barry Bergdoll: The white cube motif would appear again and again in Le Corbusier’s villas of the 1920s.