142 - Edouard Jeanneret, known as LE CORBUSIER (La Chaux-de-Fonds, 1887 – Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, 1965)

Edouard Jeanneret, known as LE CORBUSIER (La Chaux-de-Fonds, 1887 – Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, 1965) Still Life and Graffiti, 1955 Scraping and casein on paper from the Société d’Entreprises Industrielles et d’Études 13.5 x 10.7 cm Monogrammed and dated lower right: L-C 55 We would like to thank Mr. Eric Mouchet and the Le Corbusier Foundation for kindly confirming the authenticity of this work. A certificate of authenticity may be provided at the purchaser’s expense. Provenance: Noémé Triquoire, known as Nô, who received it as a gift from Le Corbusier (see a letter from Le Corbusier regarding a painting) Then passed down through the family, Pascal Boucherat Collection The pipe and the glasses are among the familiar objects that recur throughout Le Corbusier’s visual work. As early as the 1920s, they appeared in his still lifes, where everyday objects are arranged according to relationships of form, volume, and rhythm. The two glasses arranged head-to-toe—a motif already present in his earlier compositions—introduce here a play on balance and correspondences. Their arrangement may evoke the artist’s explorations of dualities and symbolic associations, without it being necessary to fix their meaning. Dated 1955, this work attests to the continuity of this artistic vocabulary during a particularly prolific period. While Le Corbusier was pursuing his major architectural projects, he simultaneously developed an independent body of visual art, enriched by recurring motifs and technical experiments. The scraping of casein on this repurposed sales card is particularly interesting: the modest medium, originally intended for commercial use, becomes the site of a spontaneous artistic intervention. These small-format works, often conceived as gifts, thus reveal a more intimate facet of his work, where artistic invention extends even to everyday objects.