XVIII

1

The Galerie Druet normally exhibited artists of the School of Paris, among them Matisse and Bonnard. Art as didactic and programmatic as the recent work by Jeanneret and Ozenfant, both of whom kept their old names as painters to make the distinction from their L’Esprit Nouveau selves, was a departure. Madame Druet, the widow of the gallery’s founder, had been persuaded by her director, Athis, to exhibit the two stalwarts of Purism, but it was not her personal taste.¹ Once the show was installed for its opening on January 22, 1921, Druet glanced at it and promptly walked back into her office—never to be seen in the gallery during the two weeks the work was up.

The twenty-five paintings by Ozenfant and twenty by Jeanneret were all the same format: one hundred by eighty-one centimeters. Those dimensions had an underlying mathematical purity; one hundred was ten squared, and eighty-one was nine squared. The formula facilitated the use of regulating lines—a passion of the painters, who had written about such proportional systems for the organization of building facades.

Jeanneret’s canvases at Druet evinced considerable progress since his show at THOMAS. However formulaic and technically serial, they are lively and animated, more bold and audacious than his previous work or than Ozenfant’s paintings. The deliberately compressed surfaces of these elaborately structured canvases present highly charged forms with multiple meanings. A shallow plate reads as the sound hole of a guitar and the top of a smokestack at the same time, so that the musical instrument and the massive pipe have the same monumentality. The compositions are charged with a lively interplay between distinct flatness and three-dimensional dynamism. Jeanneret emphasized the recesses and curves, the masses and voids, with the eye of an architect.

Music was often one of Jeanneret’s main motifs, with violins and guitars the dominant subject matter. As in musical compositions, each work has a powerful sense of progression; a major statement is followed by a sequence of reactions, with the elements different from one another yet carefully related. The earthy colors respond to one another as carefully and successfully as the four different instruments in a well-composed string quartet. The underlying plan is essential; true to his earliest training as a draftsman for the watchmaking industry, Jeanneret drew and painted on a modified grid.

The paintings were signed “Jeanneret,” the drawings “L-C.” In pencil, L-C was neat and precise yet bold. He made a very physical rhythm, endowing forms with a sculptural mass, so that the viewer feels the tough and sturdy cylindricality of stovepipes; you have the sensation that you can grab the doorknobs and pour from the pitchers. L-C imbued simple objects with majesty; to render everyday life bountiful was his goal in all media and under all his names.

2

For eighteen months, Jeanneret had been so devoured by the need to paint that he had “withdrawn from everybody in order to execute a difficult task. I have not had enough of all the hours of the year, in an agitated life and a crushing load of work, to be able to give time even to my closest friends.” Obsession was Jeanneret’s mainstay; without it, he was worthless. He needed the urgency of work and his relentless pace to feel alive. “There was not a single hour of relaxation in the whole year,” he wrote Ritter and Czadra about his and Ozenfant’s preparations for the show.² The intensity suited him. To halt or even falter for a moment would be like becoming a broken watch, with its hands frozen in place.

Once the show opened, the audience response stung. It confirmed his horror of bourgeois taste—which did not ameliorate for the rest of his life: “The public reacts: praise or scorn and indignation. We thought we were so docile and we are treated like madmen.” Louis Vauxcelles accused the work of lacking humanity. Writing Ritter, Jeanneret responded as only he could: “Vauxcelles finds all this glacial and advises me to go sleep with a trollop in the Meudon woods. Vauxcelles is also called the Knight of the Doleful Countenance, for he is sad, very sad, and it takes paprika to enliven him; paprika and ringing gold coins.”³

He continued, “Our paintings are taxed with being mechanical; myself I am certain that they imply a dream, a dignified and austere dream, but of an order above the gonads and the ‘heart.’”⁴ Jeanneret had hoped for a better response in part because he desperately needed to sell these paintings to survive. After his brief flash of success in his business ventures, following three years of trying to secure his fortune, he had been wiped out.

He now definitively abandoned his efforts to work with industry, blaming the overall international financial crisis for this debacle. But Jeanneret did manage to find the funding, from a range of sources, to continue L’Esprit Nouveau. Its message was so imperative that it had to be saved at all cost.

In an article for issue 10, Le Corbusier and Saugnier showed Greek temples and automobiles side by side. This was the essence of their gospel, for the comparison made the achievements of ancient Greece applicable to the modern world. “Geometry is our greatest creation and we are enthralled by it,” the authors wrote.⁵ Promulgating those values, Le Corbusier was on the upswing; it was a “period of healthy courage and clarity, the twilight of impressionism, of symbolism, of what was beside the facts.”⁶

Le Corbusier had a new realism about finances that Jeanneret had lacked in the days of the Maison Blanche. He recognized the necessity of funding to realize his artistic ideals, and beyond what he had found for the magazine, he succeeded in raising one hundred thousand francs for his other ventures. Cynically, he attracted the investors because he pandered to their wish for “profits, to be realized at a friendly businessmen’s lunch—convinced, between the fruit and the cheese, of the necessity of ennobling the financier’s profession by some vague investment on the dreamers’ behalf.”⁷

For all the setbacks, his life plan was now working. To Ritter, he extolled his emergence on the world stage only three years after he had made his pivotal move from La Chaux-de-Fonds: “It so happens that today I exist, much more rapidly and more powerfully than I would ever have thought. This in a country of astonishing health. The German morbidezza is alarming, and the many books and periodicals we receive appall me, outrage me, stupefy me. Yet I could not have come to anything without this desert of ordeals, which is Paris, this city where choice functions with a terrible brutality, because I have created my identity on my own foundations, on my own terms.”⁸ Having mentally planned his new self, he was now succeeding in constructing it.