JULIE V. IOVINE
The Museum of Modern Art/Richard PareThe Ronchamp Chapel (1950-55)
Le Corbusier: An Atlas of Modern Landscapes
Museum of Modern Art
Through Sept. 23
New York
Charles-Édouard Jeanneret changed his name to the curt and commanding Le Corbusier, an invented nom de plume in 1920, but that hasn't made it any easier to understand the famed Swiss architect or his work: more than 75 buildings in a dozen countries; master plans reimagining capital cities (mostly by proposing to erase their centers) from Paris to Rio to Algiers; more than 40 books, including "Towards a New Architecture" and "The Radiant City"; and hundreds of essays establishing him as one of the most influential voices in 20th-century culture.
Fondation Le Corbusier/ARS, New York / ADAGP, Paris'Blue Mountains' (1910)
A modernist pioneer in architecture, planning, criticism and painting, Le Corbusier was so heralded and reviled throughout his career that when his memorial was held in the courtyard of the Louvre in 1965, the novelist André Malraux, then minister of culture, was compelled to note how the architect was "for so long, so continuously insulted."
Le Corbusier is a rich and complicated subject for a monographic exhibition. And "Le Corbusier: An Atlas of Modern Landscapes" at the Museum of Modern Art succeeds at maintaining a sense of awe about the fearless architect once photographed in the nude baring a long zig-zagging scar from a shark attack. But the show—MoMA's first retrospective on Corbu—is also hamstrung by a theme that, by harping on "a vision profoundly rooted in nature and landscape," tries too hard to establish a too-narrow focus for the technology-obsessed master. Corbu's aesthetic emphasized the purely rational wedded to the perfectly proportioned. He embraced innovation and technology as ethical imperatives and seemed to have not the slightest ambivalence about radical change. Corbu's legacy includes open interiors with panoramic strip windows, space conceived in modular units, skinny steel columns and urban plans that would have imposed brutal uniformity on the land.
Drawing extensively from MoMA's own collections, from the Le Corbusier Foundation in Paris, and from private collections near and far, the exhibition is curated by Corbu biographer and authority Jean-Louis Cohen and by MoMA's chief curator of architecture and design, Barry Bergdoll. It includes personal and professional riches, from childhood sketches and notebooks to models, renderings and plans from practically every project devised and place visited over six decades. Among the delights are midcareer oil paintings, home movies and the 20-foot scrolls of design doodles that the architect liked to whip up on his world lecture tours. With 320 objects, it is the most Corbusier material ever to be displayed in one place, and a rare chance to immerse oneself in the evolving creative output of a genius.
The exhibition opens compellingly with watercolors that young Jeanneret painted of the Jura Mountains and forests near his childhood home in rural Switzerland, in an effort to establish his landscape-loving bona fides. It then roams through two rooms of diary entries and notebook sketches of his youthful travels through Western Europe, the Balkans, Turkey and Greece. For the uninitiated this segment of the show is especially rewarding and accessible, as the brilliantly articulate student soaks up the world and starts to formulate his ideas. Read how he describes the Acropolis in Athens as "a giant tragic carcass in the dying light above all this red earth" and the Parthenon as "a sovereign cube facing the sea." The image of the Aegean on the horizon interrupted by the thrusting temple thereafter held tremendous elemental meaning for Corbu, who reworked that combination of long horizontal and vertical in almost everything he did, from his United Nations slab rising from a platform to the hill-crowning chapel in Ronchamp, even striving for that same mighty scale.
The exhibition moves broadly, both geographically and chronologically, through the architect's professional career, interspersing realized and rejected work with paintings that dabble in Cubism, Fauvism and other popular styles from the 1920s. Dioramas of rooms he designed, complete with furnishings, including a handsomely burled desk for his mother, enliven the march of projects as they become more specialized and opaque, not to mention problematic.
Today we can appreciate but no longer embrace Corbu's vantage point in 1925 when he proposed his Plan Voisin calling for the demolition of all but a few key monuments in the center of Paris in order to make way for his super slab towers. From grim experience with Robert Moses and through the eyes of Jane Jacobs, we are appalled by the lack of sensitivity to context. But clearly he thrilled to the promise of a future full of air and light, and an escape from still-lingering 19th-century fustiness. It's a godsend that similar plans for other cities never happened, although the prints of elevated "inhabited freeways" that he envisioned snaking from mountain to sea in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo still look pretty sensational.
In later years, Corbu faced growing disillusionment over projects unrewarded or compromised. He fought with famous futility to control the design of New York's United Nations Headquarters completed by Wallace K. Harrison, sniped that Manhattan's skyscrapers weren't big enough and that the city was a "fairy catastrophe" on his first visit in 1935. But in his final 20 years he realized some of his most potently evocative and sculptural work, including the Capitol Complex in Chandigarh (1951-65) for the new Indian state of Punjab, the stacked Unité d'Habitation apartment house in Marseille, France, (1946-52) and the Ronchamp Chapel (1950-55) in eastern France.
There's a lot jammed in, and a single rewarding visit could be spent studying only his early and late villas, thoroughly documented with sketches, plans, models and images, including sumptuous recent photographs by Richard Pare commissioned for this show (but hung too high to really be savored).
If the effort to prove that Le Corbusier was as committed to landscape as he was to his abstract convictions seems sometimes strained, the show—and the extraordinarily learned and lush catalog—is brilliantly effective at providing a compelling portrait of a difficult man who in the words of Mr. Cohen "shouldered epic endeavors to transform the world."
Ms. Iovine writes about architecture for the Journal.