Le Corbusier

The so-called “International Exhibition of Arts and Techniques Applied to Modern Life” took place in Paris in 1937. The focus lay on all forms of living in modern society. Le Corbusier submitted projects for the exhibition along with Pierre Jeanneret. The project that was finally realized in 1936 was the “Pavillon des Temps Nouveaux”, a pavilion of modern times. The architects developed a temporary tent design with a steel skeleton. It housed an exhibition on popular education and the shaping of city and countryside with the help of architecture and urban planning. It focused on four functions of urban planning: living, creating, working and transporting. The walls were covered by large-scale collages dealing with the subjects selected.

The work shown here is a reproduction of one of these murals. It has a width of seven metres and a height of 3.30 metres. In his paintings, but also in his book designs, Le Corbusier combined different objects and various media. He did this in a similar way in the murals of the pavilion. On the one hand, Le Corbusier painted a schematized landscape composed of monochrome areas. A strictly geometrical architecture which is also shown schematically and exhibits a striking grid extends across the landscape like a labyrinth. Over it, the artist-architect has laid photographs of groups of people pursuing leisure activities such as bathing, playing football or reading in their living room. Here’s what Le Corbusier wrote in a text published in the magazine “Esprit Nouveau” in 1923:

“The billboard is the modern fresco, and it belongs in the street. Instead of five centuries, it only lasts for two weeks before it is replaced. It is what an orator is to a philosopher or a speech to a good book. It is violent and impermanent.”

With his large-sized artworks for the pavilion, Le Corbusier adopted the modern pictorial language of billboards and advertising.