The charismatic architect also had more to tell his mother about the gorgeous mulatto entertainer who, like him, was conquering large crowds. In São Paulo, he attended her performances. “Josephine Baker is performing here, flanked by her Pepito,” Le Corbusier wrote. “She sang, a revelation: she is a very great artist. I almost wept, so pure was this art, so full of touching generosity. Her voice, her countenance, her gestures are an intense, total creation. She is lost in a stupid, brutal milieu. Pepito is somewhat aware of this. He would like to reach her level, but he is at the bottom of a hole. Josephine has gained an enormous respect for ‘Monsieur Le Courbousher.’ She gave me a little lead elephant, telling those present at Andrade’s after my lecture: ‘Mr. Le Courbousher is not like other men; I have complete confidence in him, I am at ease, he is a great friend.’ I myself feel that she is an artist of a pure and intense sincerity. A true child. She said in Andrade’s salon: ‘I shouldn’t be here, I should be at the hotel mending Pepito’s socks. He has no socks for tomorrow, poor dear!’ Tomorrow she’s singing at the prison for the convicts who have given her a jewel box made with their own hands.”32
Pepito was in the same category as Yvonne: the sweet and loyal soul of a lower order who needed to be taken care of. Le Corbusier and Josephine Baker required such partners. But they also craved their equals in imagination and intensity.
10
By November 27, Le Corbusier was in Rio de Janeiro. Blaise Cendrars had advised him to get in touch with the commission that was planning a completely new capital city for Brazil; what interested him even more was a variety show in which Baker sang “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love, Baby.” The song had been written the previous year for Blackbirds of 1928, the longest-running black musical of the epoch. Dorothy Fields’s lyrics set to the music of Jimmy McHugh emphasized the value of warmth over money. The smiling and beguiling Baker brought that idea to life as she chanted. “I can’t give you anything but love, baby. That’s the only thing I’ve got plenty of, baby.” The unguarded sensualism of that heart-filled performance moved Le Corbusier to the brink of tears.
Within little time, she was singing to him with no one else there.
WHEN JOSEPHINE BAKER was on the stage, Le Corbusier believed that what he was seeing and hearing was in many ways the equivalent of the new architecture to which he had been devoting himself. The singer was ravishing to the eyes. Her performance was as unfettered by tradition and as honest as his designs. It was possessed of the bravery and effrontery of Le Corbusier’s houses and of his writing.
Baker’s dancing and singing had the blunt force and the constant rhythm he sought in his own work. The legs that could jump and do splits and fly through the air embodied the synchronicity of all systems in perfect working order. Physical beauty and impeccable mechanics, heart and intellect, were here allied.
As a youth in Vienna, Le Corbusier had been happier in opera houses and concert halls than at shows of the Secession. He now considered jazz on a par with the masterpieces of Puccini and Wagner: “In this American music that comes from the Negroes there is a lyrical, contemporary quality so invincible that I see in it the basis of a new musical feeling capable of expressing the new epoch and capable also of outclassing the European ways, just as in architecture the European ways outclass those of the stone age. A new leaf turned. A new discovery. Pure music.”33
ON THE RETURN TRIP from Rio de Janeiro to Bordeaux, Josephine Baker and Le Corbusier were alone in his first-class cabin of the Lutétia when she again picked up a child’s guitar, more a toy than a real instrument, and sang, “I am a little blackbird looking for a bluebird.” Critics of her public concerts described her voice as “lilliputian” and compared it to a cracked bell with a clapper covered in feathers; but Le Corbusier had no such criticism.
Strumming her toy instrument in the privacy of Le Corbusier’s stateroom, her sleek bangs curling over her forehead, her large eyes sparkling, her smile wide and radiant, Baker sang,
I’m a little blackbird looking for a bluebird,
You’re a little blackbird and a little lonesome too.
I fly all over from east to the west
In search of someone to feather my nest
Why can’t I find one the same as you do?
The answer must be that I am a Houtou.
The next verse that she sang in her lighthearted and playful but deceptively serious cadences seemed written specifically for Le Corbusier.
I’m a little jazzbo looking for a rainbow too
Building fairy castles the same as all white folks do.
For love of crying, my heart is dying to keep on trying
I’m a little blackbird looking for a bluebird too.
When Le Corbusier wrote his mother about Baker singing on the Giulio Cesare, he had made the main lyric “I’m a little black bird looking for a little white bird.” He had thought it was about him.
WHILE THE SHIP glided across the Atlantic, Le Corbusier did a number of drawings of Baker in the nude. She faces her viewer head-on, totally at ease, smiling radiantly. In one image, she has grabbed her knees with her hands in a sort of Charleston movement. But unlike the flapperesque women who specialized in the Charleston, their figures flat as boards, Josephine Baker, in Le Corbusier’s drawings, even more than in real life, has an exceptionally sturdy, full bosom and large buttocks. Her hips jut out like those of Matisse’s Blue Nude of 1907. Much as Le Corbusier liked Baker as she was, he transformed the exotic sorceress according to his own taste and made her his ideal woman (see color plates 23–25).
In another rendering, Le Corbusier gave Baker a truly primitive face, like the images Picasso and André Derain made resembling African masks. It is not a particularly good drawing. The undistinguished sketch, the cliché of a female savage, makes clear that the man who could be so utterly restrained and neat in his building facades—who could, when he needed to, put everything in its correct place down to the last centimeter—had another side that craved total abandon and wildness: in human behavior, in himself, in women. He abandoned his artistic judgment in the process. He reported a lot to his mother, but at least he didn’t send these drawings to Vevey. Rather, he kept them in his private sketchbook.
Le Corbusier also outlined a libretto for a ballet for Baker. There were nine scenes, including one calling for a modern man and woman and New York, represented by a skyscraper, to dance a one-step until a cylinder slowly descends on the stage and Baker emerges from it, dressed as a monkey. She then changes into a dress and sings until the gods rise. Finally, an ocean liner takes off to sea.
In Indian army uniform, with Josephine Baker in whiteface at his left at a costume party on board the Lutétia, in December 1929
The architect kept the drawings to himself, but he and Baker were very public on board the ship. A committee of first-class passengers had made plans for a costume ball, and Baker and Le Corbusier had decided to go to it together, in spite of the possible embarrassment for Pepito Abatino. Le Corbusier made some sketches for their costumes. In a photo of the two of them side by side—at a lavishly set dinner table with a starched white tablecloth—the architect is in blackface; Josephine appears white. He wears the boldly striped uniform of an Indian army guard; Baker is in a clown’s costume. Le Corbusier sports a polka-dot bandanna. His usually meticulous hair is combed forward in bangs that reach the top of his trademark eyeglasses, making him a total rogue. Baker, with her heavily made-up eyes, is seated on his left, enjoying an offstage moment of unmitigated pleasure.
That the earnest, hardworking architect, normally clad in his dark suit and white shirt, wanted, in his fantasy life, to be a pirate—a cad, a thief, or a con artist—is no surprise. This was just one more mask; he was used to wearing public faces. But a large part of his pleasure had nothing to do with a disguise. The woman at his side had brought him unprecedented happiness.
11
When Le Corbusier later referred to Josephine Baker, he always emphasized that she remained
uncorrupted by fame or fortune. The singer was the rare genius possessed of true innocence and kindness. “Josephine Baker, known the world over, is a little child, pure and simple,” he said. “She slips through the cracks of life. She has a warm heart. She is an admirable artist when she sings, she is out of this world when she dances.”34
Josephine Baker wrote about Le Corbusier in much the same way. Her vision of him was like his of her. She found him a pure and gentle soul, enormous fun, and a very serious artist, indeed a genius. She depicts Le Corbusier with a warmth and affection expressed by few other witnesses. But her version of their shipboard romance is played down, with her singing for him occurring in public rather than private: “In Rio we boarded the Lutétia. On board, the architect Le Corbusier. He’s been on a lecture tour. A simple man and gay; we become friends. I amuse him with my little songs, which I sing for him as we walk around the bridge. His architecture of the future seems so intelligent: on the ground, gardens for pedestrians, and the cars up in the air on elevated highways…. But he also says ‘the city is made for men, and not the contrary, Josephine!’ At the masquerade ball when we crossed the equator there were two Josephine Bakers, me and…him. He put on blackface with a feather boa! He’s irresistibly funny. Oh! Monsieur Le Corbusier, what a shame you’re an architect! You’d have made such a good partner!”35
BAKER’S ADOPTED SON, Jean-Claude Baker, has a particular slant on her affair with Le Corbusier: “For her, sex was a revenge. In those days in America you were a colored person from the Negro race, and all those pretty black girls in show business slept with white men at night. Josephine was very angry with white people, and especially white men.” The origin of that rage, her son explained, is that Baker had a white German father whom she never met. Moreover, “white men jumped on these black women—especially on Josephine and on Maude de Forest, because she was the darkest. The men went gaga; it was confusing for those young people.”
Jean-Claude Baker maintains that these motives, rather than pure attraction to Le Corbusier, underlay Baker’s involvement: “She preferred women, because she had been abused as a child. For her, sleeping with men—beyond the revenge—was a way of getting a little security.” As for the men, “They fell in love with the spontaneity and lack of education that she had.”
With Josephine Baker on board the Lutétia
Josephine Baker, her son points out, was beloved in France. She, in turn, enjoyed the respect accorded her by famous French people and the chance to know some of them: “She met Colette and slept with her. She was open, and willing to absorb like a sponge from everyone. Le Corbusier was successful…adventurous, open to the different faces of the world.” In blackface at the party, “he was almost mocking the treatment of black people in America.” The setting was perfect: “A boat is a private island, a floating paradise.”36
There were special points in common. Baker had “built a platform for her bed in her suite in Montmartre,” her son reports. Le Corbusier, too, had high platform beds—as if to put the act of sex on stage. The ship’s bunk suited them well.
12
While Le Corbusier was getting to know Josephine Baker in Rio, Yvonne was growing increasingly impatient awaiting her lover’s return. By the end of November, she had already begun to count the days until December 21. “Poor Edouard, he must be so tired,” she wrote Marie Jeanneret.37
Yvonne was adapting to life as Le Corbusier’s unofficial wife. She continued to visit the Légers often and to spend a lot of time with Pierre. She, Pierre, and the Légers went to the Salon d’Automne together. Here, for the first time, the furniture designed by Le Corbusier, Charlotte Perriand, and Pierre Jeanneret was presented publicly. With Le Corbusier in Rio, she served as a surrogate.
In her lover’s absence, Yvonne painted the kitchen and entrance of their little apartment. She embroidered the stars he had drawn on their bedspread, and she organized a big winter cleaning. Like a diligent housekeeper reporting to an absentee employer, she frequently wrote to Le Corbusier’s mother about these activities.
On December 19, Marie Jeanneret went to Paris so that on the twentieth she and Pierre and Yvonne could go to Bordeaux to greet the Lutétia. Yvonne was happy that the weather had calmed down. It meant that Le Corbusier would have a smoother passage. “His arrival is near, so now I sing all day long,” she had written her lover’s mother.38
ACCORDING TO CHARLOTTE PERRIAND’S autobiography, when the Lutétia docked at Bordeaux, she was also there to greet Le Corbusier. She claimed that her employer strutted off the Lutétia arm in arm with Baker. “Corbu was conquered,” Perriand observed.39
It makes a great story. However, given that we are certain that Yvonne, Pierre, and Le Corbusier’s mother were at the dockside, it begs plausibility. Numerous letters written about plans revolving around the arrival of the boat, as opposed to Perriand’s memoirs published nearly seventy years later, attest to the details. There is no mention of Perriand being there. Perriand, once the others were all dead, used what she knew of Le Corbusier’s truth to enliven her story, adding her own presence, but it was a falsification. Not that Perriand was alone; a slew of characters would, in retrospect, want to make it sound as if they had been more a part of Le Corbusier’s life than they were.
13
Besides the chaise longue, the armchairs, and the visitors’ chairs designed by Perriand, Le Corbusier, and Pierre Jeanneret, the display at the Salon d’Automne also included a revolving metal armchair. Here, the leather cushion is a perfect circle resting on a steel framework that spins freely on elegant, lithe legs. The back seems to grow organically from the base. The support is minimal: a curved cylinder, basically half a circle, made of thick cushioning, covered in leather. Light and taut, the chair provides all that is needed to hold a human being comfortably and not an iota more. Stools—simply the base of these chairs without the back support—were also produced.
A large table, meant for dining or as a big desk, was as simple as possible. A thick, wavy, semiopaque piece of glass rests on suction cups and devices like oversized screws on a minimal but sturdy frame. A series of smaller tables have simple tubular-steel vertical supports and a light steel frame holding clear glass; this concept was developed as both a square coffee table with short legs and a higher rectangular one of multiple uses.
This new furniture was akin to the designs being developed at the same time by Mies van der Rohe and Marcel Breuer, but the Le Corbusier–Perriand–Jeanneret designs still startled their audience in 1929. They are lighter and seemingly less serious than their German counterparts. With their deceptive appearance of weightlessness, they have the charm of a well-executed dance step. They add pleasure to the simple acts of everyday life in ways that eluded the designs made by others. They gave modernism unprecedented elegance.
INITIALLY, LE CORBUSIER and his team had offered their furniture designs to the Peugeot bicycle company, in the hope that, since Peugeot already mass-produced objects of tubular steel joined with rivets, they would want do the same with furniture. But Peugeot turned them down. The designers next approached Thonet, a company that had a new interest in tubular steel. Thonet had already mass-produced a lot of bentwood furniture—including chairs that Le Corbusier often used in his interiors—and had financed the room of furniture at the Salon d’Automne. An agreement was reached for them to produce the new pieces.
However, although these designs appeared in Thonet catalogs into the early thirties, they were not made in any quantity. The world was not yet ready for the flippancy of this furniture. It was to be a long time until those pieces began to appear in thousands upon thousands of public and private spaces all over the world, where we find them today.
14
In 1928, Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret had also designed a car. It was not manufactured, and the design was not published until 1935. In its compact shape and the overarching curve from the top of the windshield to the rear fender, the buglike vehicle, called the Voiture Minimum, was the forerun
ner of the Citroën Deux Chevaux; its rear engine would be echoed in the Quatre Chevaux and the Volkswagen Beetle. Its simple shell-like form was more aerodynamic than was the norm at the time, and it was also relatively lightweight. The car had the efficiency and straightforwardness of Le Corbusier’s most rudimentary housing units.
The idea for the interior was similar to the insides of his buildings: unencumbered space and a lot of glass allowing light to pour in and provide the inhabitants with maximum visibility. The placement of the engine at the back would decrease vibrations, noise, engine heat, and fuel smells. Concerned with the issue of storage, as he always was, Le Corbusier provided considerable luggage space in the front.
This inventive, high-spirited design became another source of resentment. Le Corbusier later believed that the automobile industry stole the idea of his little car. He could never prove the point, but some three decades later when a new Citroën was photographed at Ronchamp, Le Corbusier triumphantly denied the company the right to publish the photos.
XXX
1
Le Corbusier and his clients were, for a brief while, among the few who continued to ride the crest of the wave following the stock market crash of 1929. The architect was besieged by commissions to create luxurious residences.
In 1930, he designed a beach house in Chile for Eugenia Errázuriz, a rich, seventy-year-old patroness of the avant-garde. The former Eugenia Huici was an heiress to the fortune her father had made mining silver in Bolivia before civil war there had driven him, his Bolivian wife, and their two daughters back to his native Chile. When she was twenty years old, Eugenia had married José Tomás Errázuriz, “whose father and grandfather had both been presidents of Chile.”1 They honeymooned in Venice, where John Singer Sargent painted the bride’s portrait, and lived in London, where Augustus John and Walter Sickert also painted her. The heiress became known for her “minimalist vision of the decorative arts” and her taste for what was “very fine and very simple—above all, things made of linen, cotton, deal, or stone, whose quality improved with laundering or fading, scrubbing or polishing.” Cecil Beaton said “that the whole aesthetic of modern interior decoration, and many of the concepts of simplicity…generally acknowledged today, can be laid at her remarkable doorstep.”2
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