Le Corbusier

Heidi Weber, Zurich

Daniel Blaise Thorens Fine Art Gallery, Basel (acquired from the above)

Acquired from the above in 2000

Zurich, Kunsthaus, Le Corbusier (oeuvre plastique) 1919-1937, 1938, no. 57

Edinburgh, Fall Exhibition, French Painters, 1945

Jean Petit, Le Corbusier Lui-même, Geneva, 1970, listed p. 213 & illustrated p. 222

Naïma Jornod & Jean-Pierre Jornod, Le Corbusier (Charles Edouard Jeanneret), Catalogue Raisonné de l'oeuvre peint, Tome I, Milan, 2005, no. 162, illustrated in color p. 575

Throughout his career, Le Corbusier worked as an architect as well as a painter; the two disciplines were closely intertwined in forming a unique artistic vision. The first works to bring him wide recognition were his Purist still-lifes executed in the years following World War One, characterized by simple and pure geometric forms. Around 1930, Le Corbusier’s art started shifting towards a more organic style, where curved, irregular forms replaced the rectangles and cylinders of his earlier work. It was also at this time that the female figure became the central subject of his paintings, as evidenced by the present work Deux femmes à la draperie rouge.
In 1935, the year the present work was executed, Le Corbusier travelled to the United States, where, at the invitation of the Museum of Modern Art, he held a series of lectures at universities and museums. It was possibly his impressions from New York and its monumental architecture that inspired Le Corbusier to paint such large-scale canvases as the present work. The artist’s continuous fascination with forms and their spatial relationships is strongly apparent here in the manner in which human forms are intertwined. The dynamic structure of the composition is emphasized by the coloration of the two figures, juxtaposing the bright, vivid primary colored background, with the steely, grey-blue of the two female figures.
Deux femmes à la draperie rouge is distinguished by its important early provenance. Its first owner was Heidi Weber, Le Corbusier’s friend and arguably greatest patron who championed his work across all media. Despite Le Corbusier’s reputation as the most important pioneer of modern architecture, Weber was the first to passionately promote Le Corbusier's genius in painting, drawings, sculpture and furniture design. Weber’s devotion to the promotion of her dear friend culminated in the construction of The Pavillon Le Corbusier, a Swiss art museum at Zürichhorn designed by Le Corbusier and dedicated to the exhibition of his fine art.