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Le Corbusier and decorative art
Quodlibet publishes in Italian L’Art Décoratif d’Aujourd’hui, the book born out of Le Corbusier’s contentious desire to assert a modern vision of the objects in our everyday lives and homes.
Le Corbusier, L’arte decorativa (edited by Domitilla Dardi), Quodlibet, Macerata 2015, pp. 264, € 22.
First published in 1925, The Decorative Art of Today, along with Towards a New Architecture and The City of Tormorrow, is part of the 1920s’ trilogy that formed the basis of Le Corbusier’s thought. Now, Quodlibet is republishing it in Italian in its extensive architectural theory series. With a foreword by Domitilla Dardi, design historian, it is the edition the author revised and expanded on in 1959. Primarily composed of articles already published in the magazine L’Esprit Nouveauin 1924, in it the architect put forward the ideas behind the new concept of interior furnishings in the “pure” parallelepiped, the Esprit Nouveau pavilion he built for the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris in 1925.
Le Corbusier, L’arte decorativa, Quodlibet
The term “decorative art” is, however, used as a paradox. In the book, Le Corbusier speaks of everyday objects and furnishings – described as “equipment of the home” –, highlighting the emergence of industrially produced tools and functional type-furniture lacking decoration. They are essential objects that respond to our needs, seeking the “human scale” and the “human function” and do not belong to the artistic sphere. He was openly against the historicist movements and styles of the times, heralding the disastrous arrival of Art Deco, which indeed originated with the Expo. He contentiously addresses the themes of the debate that arose in the 20th century around artistic creation, industrialisation and the distinction between lesser and greater arts. His words echo themes already formulated by the purist movement with the type-object, even earlier by Loos and subsequently returned to by the German Werkbund, during the acrimonious debate between Henry Van de Velde and Hermann Muthesius.
Le Corbusier, L’arte decorativa, Quodlibet
Furnishing and objects are not the sole focus and architecture itself is the basic theme of the many ideas that flow in the text, precisely because decorative art is closely linked to the art of dwelling and living. In the preface, written for the second 1959 edition, Le Corbusier explains that the Pavillon de l’Esprit Nouveau, arranged for the occasion with furniture, industrial objects, sculptures and pictures, along with a presentation of masterplans for Paris, would “indissolubly link the equipment of the home (furniture) to architecture (the space inhabited, dwelling) and to urbanism (the conditions of life of a society).” He adds that, at certain times in his life, he had to reflect and conduct research before pinpointing the answers to the question he was constantly posing himself: where is the architecture? The book’s last chapter, “Confession”, lends meaning to the previous 13 chapters. In it, he describes this path, identifying the key elements from the years of his training in La Chaux-de-Fonds, then in Germany and on his trip to the Orient, that all led to his discovery of architecture as a consistent system of the spirit that has “nothing to do with decoration” and paved the way for his innovative thoughts and the birth of a “new spirit”.
Le Corbusier, L’arte decorativa, Quodlibet
Partly in order to communicate his ideas more incisively, he pays special attention to the compositional structure of the book, particularly the text and illustration layout which, as in Towards a New Architecture, tends to present the book as a total work of art. The illustrations constantly resonate with and allude and refer to the issues and criticism of the times, and are often bound to those regarding the avant-garde artists: a bidet opens the essay on museums and harks back to Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain of 1917; the pipe on the first page of the chapter on the folk culture returns to Surrealism and anticipates Magritte’s The Treachery of Images of 1928; the compositions of glass objects introduced into the argument on decorative art evoke works by Giorgio Morandi. Sometimes, the images prevail strongly over the written text, as is clear in the chapter given over to witnesses, where 26 lines of words are accompanied by 20 pages of illustrations from the Art et Décoration magazine, inserting a long visual intermission into the general narration. Photographs and drawings of objects, machines, interiors, architecture and works of art alternate with clippings from newspapers and advertising to compose a sophisticated and surprising document, clearly intended as a manifesto.
Le Corbusier, L’arte decorativa, Quodlibet
As Domitilla Dardi explains, this significant book is not being reprinted simply as a useful document for contemporary historiography, which continues to find inexhaustible and worthwhile focuses of research and exploration in Le Corbusier’s work and writings. The force of his aphorisms, theoretical reflections and its montage all make it unexpectedly and captivatingly relevant to the present. Born out of Le Corbusier’s contentious desire to assert a modern vision of the objects in our everyday lives and homes, its rich repertoire of illustrations, forms and examples makes it a precious and importantly aesthetic vade mecum for designers and the industrial production of tools and furnishing objects today. The expression “decorative art” provokingly alludes to having outgrown all decoration and to the democratisation and rationalisation of products, clearly and maturely anticipating today’s contemporary design.
