Revisiting Le Corbusier As A Fascist

Revisiting Le Corbusier as a Fascist
7/13/15 7:42 AM

by Joseph Nechvatal on July 10, 2015
http://hyperallergic.com/221158/revisiting-le-corbusier-as-a-fascist/gicNewsletter&utm_term=Revisiting%20Le%20Corbusier%20as%20a%20Fascist
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Gisle Freund, Le Corbusier, Paris (1961) ( Centre Pompidou, Guy Carrad Estate Gisle Freund/IMEC
Images)
PARIS Spoiler alert: The deplorable revelations recounted here will not ruin your appreciation of the
sublime beauty of Le Corbusiers masterpieces.
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 architects death by celebrating and highlighting his humanism.
As Marinetti and Cline 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 Corbusiers 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 Ptains 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 (Frances overtly fascist party).
Such harsh and depressing observations have been asserted recently to various degrees in Franois
Chaslins Un Corbusier (A Corbusier), Marc Perelmans Le Corbusier: Une froide vision du monde
(Le Corbusier: A Cold Vision of the World) and Xavier de Jarcys Le Corbusier, un fascisme franais
(Le Corbusier: A French Fascism). Particularly compelling is Monsieur de Jarcys work that discovered
Le Corbusier was an actual member of a militant fascist group. The Pompidou Centre itself covered Le
Corbusiers association with the Vichy regime in an exhibition more than 25 years ago. The
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overwhelming evidence shows that the architects 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.
Le Corbusier & Pierre Jeanneret, Maison Planeix

(1928) (photo FLC, ADAGP, Paris 2015 ADAGP,
Paris 2015 G. Thiriet) (click to enlarge)
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 hypermechanical times and what he called the functional engineers aesthetic.
Perhaps, as some claim, such as Mickal Labb in the Liberations 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 Italys socialist
movement). The fascist revolution of Mussolini and the growing international surge of fascism and
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authoritarian forms of philosophy are prima facie context for Le Corbusiers 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 its not all Le Corbusiers fault. Some maintain that society at large had a desire for
violent/erotic Fascism in 1923, a problem that became the object of Wilhelm Reichs famous study
Massenpsychologie 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 mid-19th century scandal surrounding the Dreyfus
affair when a Jewish soldier in the French army was made a scapegoat for a crime he didnt commit.
Degas and Czanne 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 Ptain boot licking. I
was there when in 2012 Michle 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 Ptain during WWII the motives for which can never be fully
recovered (a sad survival strategy based in ironic defense?).
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Le Corbusier & Pierre Jeanneret, Villa Savoye (1930) (photo FLC, ADAGP, Paris 2015 ADAGP, Paris
2015 Paul Koslowski)
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 ultrachic, 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-Comt (literally Free County) post-war construction can be
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 tude
pour la chemine (1918). In this early drawing we can already make out hints of Le Corbusiers
penchant for classical antiquity, especially the Parthenon, Paestum, and Hadrians Villa. Ancient Greek
and Roman formal simplicity perversely provided the chops for Corbusiers ideology, free of any
spiritual liberation (he hated Dada, Surrealism, and Expressionism).
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Le Corbusier, tude pour la chemine (1918), crayon graphite on paper, 57.5 x 71 cm ( FLC, ADAGP, Paris
2015)
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 Corbusiers 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
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houses. But living how, one might ask? There seems little care or room here for otherness or
transcendence.
Le Corbusier, Chapelle Notre Dame du Haut Ronchamp (1954) (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)
How then to accept the relaxed, sensual beauty of his successful architecture? In the age of radical
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 Corbusiers work (he echoed Pierre Winter and Benito Mussolini in his
frequent use of surgical metaphors). Even knowing what we now know, Le Corbusiers 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 Corbusiers legacy, can we defenders of secularism,
reason, libertarianism, internationalism, and solidarity appropriate his sublime work by cleaning the
cleaner?
Le Corbusier:The Measures of Man continues at the Centre Pompidou (Place Georges-Pompidou,
75004 Paris) through August 3.
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