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Le Corbusier
The Measures of Man
Centre Pompidou, Paris
April 29 - August 3, 2015
Gisèle Freund, “Le Corbusier, Paris” (1961) © Centre Pompidou, Guy Carrad © Estate Gisèle
Freund/IMEC Images
Published as Revisiting Le Corbusier as a Fascist at Hyperallergic
http://hyperallergic.com/221158/revisiting-le-corbusier-as-a-fascist/
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The backstory: New French books on architect Le Corbusier have accused him of being fascist and anti-
Semitic. Meanwhile, the exhibition The Measures of Man at Centre Pompidou commemorates the 50th
anniversary of the architect’s death by celebrating and highlighting his humanism.
As Marinetti and Céline proved, some fascists made first-rate artists. Now we can add a third name to that
short, miserable list. It is no longer a rumor. It is now fact. Le Corbusier (Charles-Edouard Jeanneret), a
native of the Swiss Jura who took French citizenship in 1930 and made Paris his home, was involved from
the 1920s until the mid-1940s with a series of far-right fascist publications that were anti-Semitic, often
racist, and always totalitarian and ultra-nationalist. He developed close ties with Pierre Winter, a doctor
who was a leader of the Revolutionary Fascist Party. The pair worked together to create the urban planning
journals Plans and Prelude. Le Corbusier’s writings in Plans and his private correspondence show he
supported Italian Fascism and Nazism, hence de facto anti-Semitism. In 1940 the architect wrote to his
mother that Jews and freemasons would “feel just law.” Le Corbusier (the poet of stiff right angles,
concrete, and delicate light) attended fascist rallies in the 1920s, privately supported the Nazis, and sought
work between 1940 and 1942 in Marshall Pétain’s Vichy. (Albeit Le Corbusier intriguingly also sought
employment in Soviet Russia, but was turned down.) It has also been revealed that the architect endorsed
various reactionary groups in the 1920s and 1930s, including Georges Valois’ Faisceau Revolutionary
Fascist Party (France’s overtly fascist party).
Such harsh and depressing observations have been asserted recently to various degrees in François
Chaslin’s Un Corbusier (A Corbusier), Marc Perelman’s Le Corbusier: Une froide vision du monde (Le
Corbusier: A Cold Vision of the World) and Xavier de Jarcy’s Le Corbusier, un fascisme français (Le
Corbusier: A French Fascism). Particularly compelling is Monsieur de Jarcy’s work that discovered Le
Corbusier was an actual member of a militant fascist group. The Pompidou Centre itself covered Le
Corbusier’s association with the Vichy regime in an exhibition more than 25 years ago. The overwhelming
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evidence shows that the architect’s fascist leanings were indeed strong and it provides some socio-
economic context that best explains why his architecture and urban planning were designed to speed up life
and make it more productive. He was obsessed with order and the need to cleanse and purge cities that
were built up haphazardly.
Though the fascist question should have a simple yes/no answer, apparently it is not that simple when it
comes to great minds (as they also say about Heidegger and Paul de Man). After all, what is at stake here is
the reputation of one of the greatest architects of the 20th century: a prophet of our own hyper-mechanical
times and what he called the functional “engineer’s aesthetic.”
Perhaps, as some claim, such as Mickaël Labbé in the Liberation’s June 19 issue, Le Corbusier was mostly
an opportunist who needed the support and money of the powerful to create, whoever they were at any
given time. In April, Paul Chemetov in Le Monde also made the point that the “context was complicated”
because “at that time, all architects were Vichy.” After all, the architect declared himself to be a socialist in
1919 and then a conservative in 1920 (the year Mussolini had begun successfully deploying the fanatical
Squadristi (the Blackshirts) to extinguish Italy’s socialist movement). The fascist revolution of Mussolini
and the growing international surge of fascism and authoritarian forms of philosophy are prima facie
context for Le Corbusier’s building projects. Still, Le Corbusier published around 20 articles that were
fascist in nature, where he declared himself in favor of a corporatist state based on the model of Mussolini
— though he never published anything, nor made any public declaration, directly aimed specifically against
Jews. Indeed in one letter to his mother he expressed some regret for how the Jews were being treated.
Some scholars, however, such as de Jarcy and Chaslin, are not convinced.
Perhaps it’s not all Le Corbusier’s fault. Some maintain that society at large had a desire for violent/erotic
Fascism in 1923, a problem that became the object of Wilhelm Reich’s famous study “Massenpsychologie
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des Faschismus” (The Mass Psychology of Fascism), later banned by the Nazis. Reich argued that it was
not because people were stupid that they submitted to fascism; rather they desired erotic satisfaction
through violence.
That may or may not be so, but the fact is that France did not experience massive popular support for
Fascism (it was a phenomenon quite alien to French political traditions). Most of the so-called fascist
leagues of the 1920s and ‘30s were not really fascist, but Bonapartist in character, connected with past
nationalistic movements. Yet we cannot ignore the late-19th century scandal surrounding the Dreyfus affair
when a Jewish soldier in the French army was made a scapegoat for a crime he didn’t commit. Degas and
Cézanne took the wrong anti-Semitic position, by the way.
The fact that Le Corbusier chose not to flee Nazi-occupied France (as other artists and intellectuals did) to
work, for me, is not insignificant. Sure, he was not alone in his Marshall Pétain boot licking. I was there
when in 2012 Michèle C. Cone pointed out at the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York that other
great avant-garde modernists, like Gertrude Stein and Francis Picabia, were also attracted to the fascist
regime of Marshall Pétain during WWII — the motives for which can never be fully recovered (a sad
survival strategy based in ironic defense?).
Was Le Corbusier indeed a utopian ideologue and political activist that aspired to totalitarianism, as
expressed in his functional, clean, white architecture? If so, does it matter at this point, when we consider
the beauty of his chilly masterpieces, such as the exquisite Villa Savoye (1930) and his ultra-chic, modern
Catholic chapel Notre-Dame-du-Haut in Ronchamp (1955), probably the greatest building that I have ever
entered?
The exquisite maquette for this Franche-Comté (literally “Free County”) post-war construction can be
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relished at the current Corbusier retrospective (none of that fascist stuff here), at the Centre Pompidou.
Here, there is an uneven but generally good selection of his paintings, sculptures, architectural drawings,
models, objects, films, photographs, documents, and drawings, such as the gracious “Étude pour la
cheminée” (1918). In this early drawing we can already make out hints of Le Corbusier’s penchant for
classical antiquity, especially the Parthenon, Paestum, and Hadrian’s Villa. Ancient Greek and Roman
formal simplicity perversely provided the chops for Corbusier’s ideology, free of any spiritual liberation
(he hated Dada, Surrealism, and Expressionism).
The exhibition and catalogue Le Corbusier: The Measures of Man are central to the ongoing public debate
on his politics, as the show stages the essential Le Corbusier paintings, designs, models, and texts on his
mechanical approach to established building proportions. Any hints of the socio-political fascist context or
anti-Semitic ideological positions are passed over here (as museums tend to do). The only indirectly telling
detail is a gallery devoted to his architectural theories.
In 1943, Le Corbusier created “The Modulor” as a physical (anthropometry) system of measurement based
on the height of the average man (183 cm) that he promoted through a book he wrote entitled The Modulor:
A Harmonious Measure to the Human Scale, Universally Applicable to Architecture and Mechanics, that
was published in 1950. The Nazis would rely on anthropometric measurements to distinguish Aryans from
Jews. Like anthropology, Le Corbusier’s theory of proportion was presented as a philosophical,
mathematical, and historical truth. It imposed on the world a supposed “universal body”: an inane
geometrical standard that, in the words of the architect, “constructed beings.” Yes, “The Modulor”
constructed machine bodies for his “machine for living” houses. But living how, one might ask? There
seems little care or room here for otherness or transcendence.
How then to accept the relaxed, sensual beauty of his successful architecture? In the age of radical
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appropriation, perhaps we can cast a pall and put aside the nauseating political/rhetorical background of the
interwar period, ignore his ideological mysticism, and consciously cut out the evil ideology behind that
period of Le Corbusier’s work (he echoed Pierre Winter and Benito Mussolini in his frequent use of
surgical metaphors). Even knowing what we now know, Le Corbusier’s masterpieces are great because
they invite complex thought in their graceful and sensuous forms. Their ravishing beauty, formal
composition, and technical achievement transcend propaganda. They might even take us to a place where
the beautiful and the terrible comingle into what we call the sublime.
Knowing that Fascism now forever taints Le Corbusier’s legacy, can we defenders of secularism, reason,
libertarianism, internationalism, and solidarity appropriate his sublime work by cleaning the cleaner?
Joseph Nechvatal
Le Corbusier & Pierre Jeanneret, “Villa Savoye” (1930) Photo © FLC, ADAGP, Paris 2015 © ADAGP,
Paris 2015 © Paul Koslowski
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Le Corbusier, “Chapelle Notre Dame du Haut” Ronchamp (1954) (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)
Le Corbusier, Chapelle “Notre-Dame-du-Haut, Ronchamp” (1955) Maquette, plâtre, 36 x 61 x 56 cm ©
Centre Pompidou / Dist. RMN-GP / B. Prévost © ADAGP, Paris 2015
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Le Corbusier, “Étude pour la cheminée” (1918) Cayon graphite sur papier, 57,5 x 71 cm © FLC, ADAGP,
Paris 2015
“Ribot” (1923) Plâtre, 104.5 x 54.5 x 64.5 cm © FLC, ADAGP, Paris 2015
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Le Corbusier & Pierre Jeanneret, “Maison Planeix” (1928) Photo © FLC, ADAGP, Paris 2015 © ADAGP,
Paris 2015 © G. Thiriet
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Le Corbusier & Pierre Jeanneret, “Maison Guiette” (1926) Anvers Belgium Photo © FLC, ADAGP, Paris
2015 © ADAGP, Paris 2015 © Maury
Le Corbusier & Pierre Jeanneret, “Maison Weissenhoff” (1927) Stuttgart, Germany Photo © FLC,
ADAGP, Paris 2015 © ADAGP, Paris 2015 © Dr. Lossen & Co