E-1027 and the «drôle de guerre

1. For a history of French new town planning, including the sources used in this article see chapter 5 of Kenny Cupers, The Social Project: Housing Postwar France (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2014). 2. The film was also released under the English-language title, Boyfriends and Girlfriends, perhaps in an effort to simplify the construction through the use of the plural. 3. Interview with Jean-Luc Godard by Alain Bergala, in Jean-Luc Godard par Jean-Luc Godard (Paris: Éditions Cahiers du cinéma, 1985), p 9, quoted in Antoine de Baecque and Noël Herpe, Éric Rohmer: A Biography, translated by Steven Rendall and Lisa Neal (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2016), pp 43–44. 4. See Tom Gunning, ‘Éric Rohmer and the Legacy of Cinematic Realism’, in Leah Anderst (ed), The Films of Éric Rohmer: French New Wave to Old Master (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p 25. 5. The full script is published in L’avant-scène cinéma, December 1987. For a discussion of symmetry in the film see Jacques Aumont, ‘L’extraordinaire et le solide’, ibid, pp 3–12, and Thomas Ennis, ‘Games People Play: An Analysis of Éric Rohmer’s L’Ami de mon amie’, Nottingham French Studies 31 (1993), pp 121–27. 6. For a detailed, albeit overly symbolic, analysis of the use of colour in Rohmer’s films, see Fiona Handyside, ‘Colour and Meaning in the Films of Éric Rohmer’, in Simon Brown, Sarah Street and Liz Watkins (eds), Colour and the Moving Image: History, Theory, Aesthetics, Archive (London: Routledge, 2013), pp 150–59. 7. Kristin Ross has discussed the postwar shift from the more traditional notion of ‘métier’ to that of ‘career’ in French cultural life. The characters in L’Ami de mon amie could be said to embody this shift towards what Ross calls ‘experience at work: the cumulative perfecting of skills, the ascent towards accomplishing more and more highly appreciated and rewarded tasks’. Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonisation and the Reordering of French Culture (Cambridge, Ma: MiT Press, 1995), p 168. 8. Andrew Saint, ‘New Town Score’, Architects’ Journal, 8 November 1989, p 27. 9. Ibid, p 28. Saint’s comments are part of his review of an exhibition about Cergy-Pontoise held in the prefecture building in 1989. His overall judgement is positive, especially relative to the British New Town experience: ‘Cergy, on its handsome horseshoe site overlooking the Oise, is sitting pretty. The fact that it could put on this grandiose exhibition without any of the popular sociology or spoon-feeding which would be felt necessary for a similar exercise in Britain is a tribute to its peculiarly French sense of confidence’, ibid. 10. Éric Rohmer’s continued interest in the development of Cergy-Pontoise meant that in 1985 he was asked to become a ‘sponsor’ for the development of the Axe Majeur quarter. He was able to access major buildings while 122 they were under construction, and talk with the architects. He organised the shooting schedule of L’Ami de mon amie to coincide with the completion of Le Belvédère. See Antoine de Baecque and Noël Herpe, op cit, pp 395–98. 11. Perhaps inevitably some of the critical writing around L’Ami de mon amie wants to read it as a kind of social document. See in particular Leah Anderst, ‘Rohmer’s Poetics of Placelessness’, in Leah Anderst, op cit, 191–201; Fiona Handyside, ‘The Margins Don’t Have to Be Marginal: The Banlieue in the Films of Éric Rohmer’, in Helen Vassallo and Paul Cooke (eds), Alienation and Alterity: Otherness in Modern and Contemporary Francophone Contexts (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2009), pp 201–22; Fiona Handyside, ‘“J’ai aimé vivre là”: Rethinking the Parisian Suburbs in Annie Ernaux and Éric Rohmer’, Nottingham French Studies 48 (2009), pp 43–55. architectural subject, L’Arbre, le maire, et la médiathèque (The Tree, the Mayor and the Médiathèque). The story, directly engaging Rohmer’s ambivalent relation to contemporary architecture, is one of developmental hubris in the context of socialist policies for the diffusion of culture via the architectural means of the médiathèque, which in the film comes across as a dubious, populist programme directly threatening rural heritage. 19. See Antoine de Baecque and Noël Herpe, op cit, pp 373–78. Bizarrely, and echoing his own change of identity, Rohmer rechristened Chaulet on discovering her in a stage play, replacing her given name Frédérique with Emmanuelle. 20. ‘Cergy-Pontoise ville nouvelle, brochure de promotion, 1968’, Archives nationales, Centre des archives contemporaines, Fontainebleau, CaC 199110585/009. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 12. Ibid, p 383. 13. Noël Herpe and Philippe Fauvel, ‘Cinquième entretien: “Architecture d’Apocalypse”’, Éric Rohmer: Le celluloïd et le marbre (Paris: Editions Léo Scheer, 2010), p 156, quoted in Antoine de Baecque and Noël Herpe, ibid, p 594. 14. Claude Parent and Paul Virilio were also the subject of Éric Rohmer’s TV documentary Entretien sur le béton (A Conversation About Concrete), 1969. 15. Antoine de Baecque and Noël Herpe, op cit, p 382. 16. Ibid, p 386. This series emerged from two previous proposals Éric Rohmer had put together in the late 1960s: Architectopolis and Architecture présente. 17. Antoine de Baecque, ‘Interview: Architecture-fiction’ (Libération, 29 March 2002), ibid, p 396. 18. Ibid. In 1993 Rohmer would complete another feature film with an 21. This is indicative of the way Éric Rohmer’s oeuvre is treated in the major English-language monographs on his work: C G Crisp, Éric Rohmer: Realist and Moralist (Bloomington, iN: Indiana University Press, 1988); Derek Schilling, Éric Rohmer (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007); and Keith Tester, Éric Rohmer: Film as Theology (Basingstoke: Pallgrave Macmillan, 2008). 22. Pascal Bonitzer, Jean-Louis Comolli, Serge Daney and Jean Narboni, ‘New Interview with Éric Rohmer’, Cahiers du cinéma, no 219 (1970), republished in Senses of Cinema 54 (April 2010), online at http://sensesofcinema.com/2010/ feature-articles/new-interviewwith-eric-rohmer. Rohmer had countered this injunction himself in a letter to a critic, where he stated ‘My characters’ discourse is not necessarily 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. Cergy-St Christophe train station, 2016 All photographs © Charles Rice 41. my film’s discourse’. Éric Rohmer, ‘Letter to a Critic [concerning my Contes moraux (Moral Tales)]’, in Éric Rohmer, The Taste for Beauty, op cit, p 80. Pascal Bonitzer et al, op cit. Antoine de Baecque and Noël Herpe, op cit, p 398. Pascal Bonitzer et al, op cit. Éric Rohmer’s interview is prefaced thus: ‘Everything in this interview with Éric Rohmer opposes us to him.’ At one point he and his interviewers disagree over whether historical materialism is a science, though the interviewers do explain their interest in Rohmer’s cinema, and the purpose of the interview by stating that ‘it is the impurity and complexity of our differences that have retained our interest.’ Ibid. Ibid. Emilie Bickerton, A Short History of Cahiers du Cinéma (London: Verso, 2009), p 39. In a later interview with Narboni, one which prefaces a collection of Éric Rohmer’s writing on film, Rohmer says that his earlier dogmatism about the specificity of cinema as an art, and the idea of its coming age of classicism, had been rethought by the middle of the 1960s, when he found himself ‘agreeing with Cahiers’ new viewpoint’ under Rivette’s editorship. Jean Narboni, ‘The Critical Years: Interview with Éric Rohmer’, in Éric Rohmer, The Taste for Beauty, op cit, p 3. Ibid, p 19. Ibid, p 22. Ibid, p 23–24. Éric Rohmer distinguishes Buster Keaton from Charlie Chaplin, whose visual gags, he argues, are readily communicable and would be reproducible by means other than the cinematic. Tom Gunning, op cit, p 25. Ibid, p 26. Ibid, p 30. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (London: Athlone, 1989), p 183. For Éric Rohmer’s own thoughts on indirect discourse, see Éric Rohmer, The Taste for Beauty, op cit, pp 84–92. Gilles Deleuze, op cit, p 243. Éric Rohmer, The Taste for Beauty, op cit, p 26. In 1972 Rohmer completed a doctoral dissertation on F W Murnau’s Faust. ‘L’expérience française des villes nouvelles, Fondation nationale des sciences politiques, Jean-Eudes Roullier’, CaC 19840342/171. Bernard Hirsch, ‘Oublier Cergy … L’invention d’une ville nouvelle, Cergy-Pontoise 1965–1975, Récit d’un témoignage’ (Paris: Presses de l’École nationale des Ponts et chaussées, 1990), p 58. Emilie Bickerton characterises this moment as a shift away from the politique des auteurswhich typified Cahiers during Rohmer’s tenure, and towards a new politics, ‘with the aim of developing a more rigorous theory, rather than a vague, non-transferable quality of taste’. Emilie Bickerton, A Short History of Cahiers du Cinéma, op cit, p 52. Antoine de Baecque and Noël Herpe, op cit, p 375. aa files 74 E-1027 and the Drôle de Guerre Tim Benton Le Corbusier and his wife Yvonne in front of one of his murals at E-1027, photographed by Madeleine Goisot and hand-coloured by Yvonne, 1939 © FLC, Paris We are at the movies, looking at a reconstruction of Eileen Gray’s bedroom-boudoir for Monte Carlo, which she presented at the Salon des artistes décorateurs in May 1923. The film is The Price of Desire, directed by Mary McGuckian and released by Pembridge Pictures in 2015. The voice ‘off’ – Le Corbusier – announces: ‘When I first saw her exhibit, her innovation filled me with jealousy and awe in equal measure. We were contemporaries. Le Corbusier: a struggling painter whose architectural ambition was barely born; Eileen Gray: the great creator of luxurious interiors had already arrived. Our careers were destined to collide.’ Le Corbusier, Jean Badovici and Fernand Léger, seen from behind, are then shown admiring Gray’s exhibit: ‘I’ve never seen anything like it’, says Le Corbusier in French. Léger enthuses, ‘I like it, I like it a lot, a sojourn into the never-before-seen … not an ounce of decorative influence’.1 Léger challenges Le Corbusier: ‘a new direction, hey Corbu! Each object defined by its function, transcending decorative art.’ Le Corbusier sums up: ‘Pure, functional, eclectic, elegant.’ Significant research seems to have gone into the film’s script, not least in the way the screenwriter has picked out passages from a text Badovici wrote to accompany a black-and-white illustration of the Monte Carlo suite in the autumn–winter 1924 issue of L’Architecture Vivante. Badovici captioned the installation ‘Hall 1922’, and noted that ‘the form of any object is dictated by the function that it has to fulfil; its architecture is fundamentally functional. The smallest details have to be rigorously ordered in relation to the whole, which presupposes the absolute elimination of every element that is not useful to the construction of the whole; such ornament that remains is closely determined by the material.’ Most of Badovici’s text, however, is devoted to a celebration of Gray’s sensibility and her ability to create ‘an atmosphere of plastic infinity’ and ‘a mysterious, vivid unity’. Faced with the advance of science and reason, it is the task of the artist, Badovici maintains, to uncover the ‘secret relations’ that bind man to the universe – the ‘hitherto unsuspected paths’ that lie beyond science’s grasp. McGuckian’s argument in the film is that Le Corbusier learned about modernism from Gray, and thus contracted an unpaid debt of gratitude which obsessed him throughout his life. However, even the most cursory look at his timeline immediately challenges this idea, because his diorama of the Cité contemporaine pour trois millions d’habitants and the model of his Citrohan ii house – hardly the products of a struggling artist – had been exhibited the year before. These were widely reviewed and even shown on Pathé news. Le Corbusier’s star was undeniably in ascendancy, as he captured international attention with his articles in 124 L’Esprit Nouveau (1920–25), his outrageous urban schemes and his purist house designs. He would also publish the first edition of Vers une architecture in October 1923 – the same month that his plaster model for the penultimate project for the La Roche and Jeanneret houses went on show in the Salon d’Automne, along with models of the Besnus house and Maison Ribot project. By then, Le Corbusier had already published the articles which would constitute his book Urbanisme and was about to write a series of texts, later published as L’Art décoratif d’aujourd’hui, that made clear his low opinion of the decorative artist: ‘The decorator decorates. Why does he decorate? What is it that compels him to decorate, what law or truly human need? The boudoir, the dining-room boudoir, the library-boudoir, etc, are not the living spaces that should concern us.’2 Warming to his theme, in May 1924 he defined precisely the difference between his approach and the position taken by Eileen Gray, as an interior designer: ‘Is this at last, by some miracle, the much sought after definition of the term DeCORaTiVe aRT? Against the object-as-tool they propose the object-as-sentiment, the object-as-life.’3 A more exact sense of what is meant by object-as-life is conveyed by an unpublished manuscript by Gray’s friend Badovici. Her eyes take infinite pleasure from caressing those structures derived from the new spiritual demands, digging deep into her imagination, which is not at risk of evaporating, given the life she leads and the atmosphere she breathes. You have to admire her beautiful use of materials, her skill as an artist, often her good taste and sensibility to beauty etc, etc… But it must be pointed out that she ends up producing unique objects set apart by their luxurious materials, their rarity of décor.4 In this light, it is difficult to imagine Le Corbusier seeing Gray’s Monte Carlo boudoir – if indeed he ever went to look at it – as anything other than a highly original example of les arts décoratifs, anathema to the modern movement as he then understood it. As a result – and in spite of the obvious brilliance of Gray’s work – it seems impossible to argue that it had any relevance to his very focused concerns. The Price of Desire is a pleasant film with attractive and persuasive characterisations of the principal characters – Gray, Badovici, Léger and Le Corbusier – who are often seen together, drinking and debating.5 Poetic licence dictates much of the detail, and why not, it’s fiction after all? But the spine of the film turns on an argument that has an academic pedigree. This is the view that Le Corbusier was jealous of Gray, obsessed with her work and went out of his way Orla Brady as Eileen Gray, Francesco Scianna as Jean Badovici and Vincent Perez as Le Corbusier, The Price of Desire, directed by Mary McGuckian, 2015 © Julian Lennon to deface it, deny her authorship and hide his debt to her genius. So let us look into this view, which has become orthodoxy since the publication of an article by the historian Beatriz Colomina, variously titled ‘War on Architecture’ and ‘Battle Lines’.6 Let us begin with a simple question: did Le Corbusier, in fact, know Eileen Gray – did they ever meet in these early years? It is actually not an easy one to answer. Gray was certainly interested in Le Corbusier’s work by 1922, when she asked her friend Kate Weatherby to obtain copies of L’Esprit Nouveau from Evie Hone.7 Jennifer Goff, author of the most recent and most detailed biography of Gray, suggests that the two did meet at this time, at 20 rue Jacob, where Le Corbusier occupied a garret from 1917 to 1933 and where Gray attended at least some of Natalie Clifford Barney’s literary salons, with or without her friend Romaine Brooks.8 But Le Corbusier’s plentiful letters to his mother make no mention of his being aware of the Barney set. And more generally, there is no clear basis to support Goff’s claims. They certainly met after the Second World War, but there is no evidence that they knew each other before 1956.9 I have been through all Le Corbusier’s personal diaries of the 1920s and 1930s and have identified the dates for almost every page.10 I can find no trace of Gray’s name. If they met, neither thought it worth mentioning. The English journalist Frances Stonor Saunders has also asserted that ‘Gray had met Le Corbusier. She was introduced to him through Jean Badovici, a penniless young Romanian architect who shared a garret with Greek journalist Christian Zervos.’11 There is no evidence to support this either. Gray told a journalist in the 1970s that she and Le Corbusier had been friends but hardly ever saw each other, due to his continual travelling.12 This probably refers to the postwar period. In the press release for the Heinz Gallery exhibition on Eileen Gray in London (1973), Alan Irvine claimed that it was Le Corbusier who persuaded Gray to move towards architecture.13 Some prints of Le Corbusier’s drawings, mostly of buildings from 1928, were in Gray’s possession. Perhaps the undisclosed Gray correspondence in private and public hands will eventually provide more solid evidence. But surely Gray and Le Corbusier must have crossed paths in Paris at any number of exhibitions or gallery openings? Le Corbusier certainly visited shows at the Salon des artistes décorateurs, but he preferred to exhibit at the Salon d’Automne, and it is extremely unlikely that he would have lingered in Jean Désert, the shop Gray opened to sell her work and that of her clients (he is not mentioned in the list of clients’ addresses, conserved in the V&A’s Eileen Gray archive).14 Gray, for her part, was notoriously shy of exhibition openings and parties. She normally exhibited in the Salon des artistes aa files 74 décorateurs, of which she was a member, although she also showed some pieces in the Salon d’Automne in 1922 and 1923.15 Perhaps the two met, perhaps they did not. Whatever the case, they were certainly not close friends in the interwar period. It is significant that as late as 1958 Le Corbusier has to make a note of Gray’s address in the rue Bonaparte, as if this was the first time he had written to her.16 He still does not know how to spell her name. When he referred to ‘Helen Gray’ in his book My Work (1960), he was probably transposing into English the oral ‘Hélène’, which in French is phonetically transcribed ‘Eh-len’. He was not alone. Badovici misspells her name (‘Eillen’) in the manuscript draft of his article about her work in 1924 (which suggests they did not know each other very well at that time), as does Louis Vauxcelles (‘Eleen Grey’) and Waldemar George (‘Ellen’) in pieces published in May 1920 and 1923 – all of which demonstrates the difficulty of understanding the name ‘Eileen’ (Ay-leen) in French.17 Even in Des Canons, des munitions? Merci! Des logis… svp, a publication commemorating the Pavillon des Temps Nouveaux that Le Corbusier certainly proofread, the caption to an illustration of her Centre for Vacations and Leisure is labelled ‘Eelen Gray’.18 And then there is the Badovici connection. Le Corbusier and Jean Badovici became close friends, and Gray and Badovici were friends and for a time, apparently, lovers. However, the remaining evidence suggests that Le Corbusier and Badovici were not close in 1923, as suggested in the film, but only became friendly in 1927 or 1928, by which time the intimate relationship between Badovici and Gray was drawing to a close. The correspondence between Le Corbusier and Badovici held in the Fondation Le Corbusier begins in December 1926, with a postcard addressed to ‘Cher monsieur’ and signing off ‘très cordialement à vous Ch E Jeanneret’.19 As late as 16 July 1928 Le Corbusier still addresses him as ‘Monsieur Badovici’ and signs formally (‘Croyez, cher monsieur à mes meilleurs sentiments’) and with his real name rather than his more familiar sign-off ‘Corbu’.20 But a letter written barely two weeks later seems to signal a turning point. Addressing Le Corbusier as ‘Cher ami’ on 1 August 1928,21 Badovici responds to a strongly critical letter about the illustrations for L’Architecture Vivante: ‘It’s not the kind of letter you send to a friend who loves you and defends you. It’s frankly idiotic. If I did not have the greatest sympathy and profoundest admiration for you, I would have dropped you after that letter.’ Le Corbusier appeases him with the ending ‘amicalement’ in his response on 22 September 1928, and finally arrives at the salutation ‘Cher ami’ on 8 November 1928.22 This is a year after Badovici published the first of seven special issues of L’Architecture aa files 74 Vivante (autumn–winter 1927) on the work of Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret. Before this date Badovici was actually somewhat hesitant about Le Corbusier’s architecture. In a manuscript from c 1925 covering many subjects of life, death and the arts, Badovici refers to the La Roche villa as ‘rigorously cerebral, not so much an “ivory tower” as a futurist “sanctum” for one’s weekly Sunday rest, a refuge … the incidence of light makes you think, at certain moments, that you’re shut in an aquarium, if not in a rock crystal or a stony coral.’23 At the same time he referred to Le Corbusier as a Swiss Lutheran and noted that the inhabitants of his houses would have to burn their belongings, for lack of cupboards and bookshelves. But he is more positive in a short text written to accompany three illustrations of the Ozenfant studio in the 1925 spring–summer issue of L’Architecture Vivante, and in his notes about the villa ‘Le Lac’ and the Esprit Nouveau Pavilion in the 1925 autumn–winter issue, even if Badovici’s real interest at the time was in Dutch, German and Russian avant-garde architecture.24 The first albums he created for the publisher Albert Morancé in 1923 and 1924 focused on what is now called art deco: the work of Charles Plumet, the designs of Louis Süe and André Mare, and the furniture of Jacques-Emile Ruhlmann. In 1925 Badovici published a magnificent coloured edition of art deco interiors, including Gray’s Boudoir for Monte Carlo of 1923.25 It is not until 1934 that we have evidence that Le Corbusier and Badovici regularly dined together.26 On 14 December Le Corbusier asks ‘Bado’ whether he would prefer one of Yvonne’s aiolis or roast veal. He invites him to bring ‘le petit matelot’, a reference to Badovici’s mistress, Madeleine Goisot. Le Corbusier’s first visit to Badovici’s house at Vézelay, 200km southeast of Paris, seems to have been that same year.27 By then Badovici appears devoted to Le Corbusier. A set of notes, written in pencil, attempted to capture his feelings about his friend: Le Corbusier is astonishing. Why is that? On reflection, it turns out that he’s almost always talking common sense… Le Corbusier is too well read. He does not know how to stand naked before a naked statue. He has to dig out of his pockets a pile of notes and sketchbooks… Corbu told himself: to know what everyone knows is to know nothing! Knowledge begins where public ignorance ends! Real science, too, exists outside science … Le Corbusier has taught all of us a lesson. We tried to create based on our own resources, with ingenuity and contradiction, but his thinking went further. Opposite above: Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret, model of maisons La Roche-Jeanneret, Salon d’Automne, 1923 © FLC, Paris Opposite below: Eileen Gray, ‘Une chambre à coucher boudoir pour Monte-Carlo’, Salon des artistes décorateurs, 1923 From Intérieurs Français, 1925 He has a more opulent character. But do not try to find Le Corbusier in the Corbusian features of our art of the last century, because his greatness lies in the fact that his thinking has always been at a tangent.28 To be clear, then, by the time Le Corbusier and Badovici became friends, late in 1928, Gray had already more or less moved permanently to Roquebrune on the Mediterranean coast, in the far southeast corner of France, to work on her first architectural commission – a seaside villa for Badovici, that would become her masterpiece, E-1027.29 Le Corbusier did not go to Roquebrune before 1937 – a letter from the poet and art critic Pierre Gueguen to Badovici, written on 14 April that year, refers to this visit, where Le Corbusier was accompanied by his wife Yvonne.30 More, however, needs to be understood about the relationship between Eileen Gray and Jean Badovici. All the biographers insist they were lovers, and presumably this derives not just from the entwined code for the villa (E stands for Eileen, 10 for Jean – the tenth letter of the alphabet – 2 for Badovici and 7 for Gray), but from the accounts of Gray herself and her niece, Prunella Clough. Clearly, these have to be respected. And yet, as indicated earlier, Badovici did not know how to spell her name as late as 1924, and the only intimate correspondence that I am aware of between Badovici and Gray consists of an undated draft letter that mentions ‘passion’ but in a curiously stilted vein. Like all Badovici’s draft letters, it is full of erasures and additions, and is difficult to decipher. No other letters are addressed to Eileen. Many thanks, dear Miss Gray for your kind words. Enjoy, Miss Gray, the rest you so need […the pleasure that the Côte d’Azur can offer you… text in roman erased]. It was with the joy of one who is fondly attached to you that I read your reminiscences in your letter. [My admiration and my need to confess and express myself… You cannot escape from yourself by fleeing to others; you have to search deep in your own being to find equilibrium … text in roman erased]. I am flattered … that you have confidence in me, even more so for your kindness in wishing to make your gentle [illegible word]. In any case, I have tried to clothe this passion in the seemliest way possible. And in order to ennoble it have tried to set it alongside all that men hold most respectable.31 Yet the Getty Research Institute Archives contain ample evidence of Badovici’s entanglements with other women in the period 1928 to 1929, in the form of other extensive and often very peculiar drafts of love letters. In some cases the recipients are unidentified, but four women are named. Besides Madeleine (‘Mad’) Goisot, his mistress from about 1930 to 1946, there is Jacqueline (‘Jack’), Lia (‘Golia’) and Odette, who Badovici seems to have met in Paris. The letters 127 to Odette are among the most sensual and relaxed (‘A moment of infinity … It is so peaceful to detach oneself from the earth. A fresh taste of life. O-dette. It’s an echo which plummets to the bottom of my being like a stone down a well… Your fingers, Odette, descending in a startled spiral or bunched in a ball… Surround me with a hundred thousand similar fingers. I would so much like, my Odette … to kiss your breath in order to colour it’).32 The phrase ‘kiss your breath’ appears in other letters too. Elsewhere he writes, ‘I want so much to kiss your opium nails’. Lia – frequently addressed as ‘Lia, Lia délicieux bonhomme’ – remains a mystery. The letters to her contain many references to art and music and play on her irony and sophistication: ‘Distance, politeness, cruelty. Picasso or Alexandrian arithmetic, humour, malice and above all charm.’33 Jacqueline seems to be someone he encountered on a train. She came from Illats in the Gironde and was very young.34 Although there is one letter referring to his waiting for her at Roquebrune, they would have most probably seen each other at Vézelay, since she lived part of the time with Badovici’s friends Yves Renaudin and Olga Battanchon. The correspondence must date from 1928–30, because in one letter he offers to send her ‘a beautiful book, all in colour, that I published four years ago’: this must be the album Intérieurs Français published by Albert Morancé in 1925.35 In his letters, Badovici constructs the conceit of two Jacquelines; the real one, who says no, and Jacqueline of his dreams, who arrives in a cabriolet: ‘I apologise for receiving you in my birthday suit, Jacqueline. It’s your fault; you arrived in your cabriolet without a warning! This evening we will go the whole hog. We will eat both the horse and the carriage. A feast!’36 These implicit references to physical love-making aside, the overall tone in all of the letters is a highly coloured and sentimental spirituality. There is also a connection with his writing on architecture in that Badovici refers constantly to âme (soul) – in the love letters, being true to one’s soul is to follow instincts and drop convention (and resistance). Another key word used constantly is vie (life) – if only the women would agree to live… One particular letter, addressed simply to ‘Madame’, is the most interesting of them all.37 Respectful, his lust clearly unrequited, Badovici claims that he did not usually like to offer companionship to women, but that he would welcome the friendship of someone who had a real sense of life and who worked creatively. It is even possible that it relates to the beginning of his friendship with Eileen Gray. Ah! How much I want to tell you, my dreamfriend, of my dreamings. You know that I dare not open my eyes for fear of losing you. In my mind, you are a fixed point; the more I stare at it the more enormous it becomes. This is music for me. A 128 coloured orgy! I dream that I am alive and my dream dies. Like a bastard, I knocked it down. Because I know that the dream is absurd. How can I live far from the light which surrounds you like a caress?38 With Madeleine Goisot, Badovici was much more direct. In a letter written in January 1928 he accuses her of being ‘made of ice inside, truly Eskimo … nose pressed against the window of your soul’.39 Elsewhere, he accuses her of treating him like a child, or like a woman. Before long, however, the consolidation of their relationship is reflected by a shift into full purple-prose mode: ‘Our intimate rhythm, in its surging, raises up our heart, and it’s there that we seek the forms of friendship and of suffering’, Badovici writes. 40 Though the couple stayed together until 1945, Yvonne Le Corbusier – a good friend – said that Badovici was méchant (mean) with Madeleine and it is clear that he was drinking heavily by the 1940s. A letter to Badovici (signed ‘Gervais’ and written at the end of the war) complains of his aggressive and unreasonable behaviour. ‘For some time now, when you drink you become mean, jealous, and unguarded in your speech, which is a sign – no matter what you say – of an alcoholic disorder.’41 At the beginning of their relationship, around 1930, Badovici refers to Madeleine as ‘si jeune’. She was not nearly as young, however, as Mireille Roupest, the 18-year old mistress who replaced her after Madeleine Goisot’s departure in 1946, and whose arrival prompted Le Corbusier to write crossly to Badovici in 1949, complaining that Mireille’s presence would offend the sensibilities of José-Luis Sert and Paul Lester Wiener – ‘these Spaniards from extremely respectable backgrounds’ – who had come to work on the pilot plan for Medellín.42 Dipping into Badovici’s correspondence also introduces us to the world of men and women in Vézelay, where Badovici bought eight properties between 1927 and 1937, hoping to create an artist’s colony. Badovici first came to Vézelay in response to a request from his close friend, the painter Yves Renaudin, who was one of his neighbours in Paris.43 Renaudin’s lover, Olga Battanchon – also a painter, and one with a greater reputation – had bought two adjacent stone houses in Vézelay with a beautiful view. Badovici was asked to restore and modernise them. Around 35 undated letters in the Pompidou archive allow us to follow the construction of the Renaudin-Battanchon home, which seems to have been close to completion in 1928.44 From these we learn that between August and October 1927 Badovici bought two very small houses on the rue de l’Argenterie, which he began to rebuild for his own use.45 He then Eileen Gray & Jean Badovici, living room and guest room, E-1027, 1929 From Architecture Vivante, 1929 bought three additional houses on the rue de la Porte Neuve between 1927 and 1932, which he unified and renovated for visiting artists, as well as four other properties in Vézelay for storage or rental. Although Gray may have helped him purchase the houses on the rue de l’Argenterie, Badovici had a small income from renting and then selling the family home in Bucharest.46 Based on some sketches in the V&A, the historian Caroline Constant believes that Gray played a significant role in the design of the Renaudin-Battanchon and Badovici houses in Vézelay. She may well be right, especially since these sketches include details of fixtures and fittings, including folding screens, which match Gray’s design vocabulary. But certain, somewhat forensic, graphological features in these sketches give grounds for doubt. For example, Gray does not normally bar her 7s in the continental manner, nor does she use the comma, rather than the period, for the decimal point.47 In fact, I see certain similarities between the handwriting on the sketch and Badovici’s own hand.48 Furthermore, there are few sketches of this kind in the Gray papers, but at least one very similar one in the Badovici archive. There are a number of other drawings for these two houses which, I believe, need further analysis. It is likely that some of them are by Renaudin, who supervised building work and corresponded with Badovici on certain key decisions. Attributing the three sketches to Badovici would also make sense from another point of view. In none of the plentiful correspondence with the builders or with Renaudin is Gray mentioned, even once. Yves Renaudin seems to have been unaware of her presence and never asks after her. And as we know, between 1926 and 1929 Gray was mostly in the south of France, working on the villa. Although her E-1027 adjustable table is visible in one photograph, the house was mostly furnished with Marcel Breuer’s B11 tubular steel chairs and collapsible wood and metal chairs. If, as seems likely, Badovici was carrying on with Jacqueline and perhaps other women in the period 1927–29, Vézelay might also not have seemed a welcoming place for Gray. Badovici’s work at Vézelay is important for another reason. He is sometimes represented as the pure modernist, a foil to Gray’s more sensitive approach. But if the Vézelay houses were in fact designed by Badovici, then they show him to be a master of the flexible adaptation of space, materials and lifestyle. This was in any case the impression formed by Le Corbusier, who began visiting Badovici in Vézelay from 1934. By this time, Le Corbusier had abandoned the principles of his ‘Five Points for a New Architecture’ – as evidenced by his house for Madame de Mandrot, designed in 1929 and built over the next two years.49 The Vézelay houses are similarly representative of a different strain of aa files 74 modernism: set into the landscape, they have rough stone walls, no externally visible pilotis, no roof garden and no long window. A set of five photographs of Badovici’s house, taken by Pierre Jeanneret, was even published by Le Cobusier in La Ville Radieuse, together with a glowing description of its interiors. The architect Jean Badovici, director of L’Architecture Vivante, has bought up some of these crumbling houses. He brings in the modern spirit. Here is his own home an old, old house with an oak-beamed ceiling. The height between storeys is 2.2m. He breaks through one floor; in this way he connects two storeys; he turns them into a modern living unit. Never mind archaeology! He settles in with the instruments of the present day. A few of us are gathered there, living and active beings of today: Fernand Léger the painter, Gueguen and Bonheur poets, Zervos, director of Cahiers d’Art; Ghyka [sic], painter. We are in a lair for men. On our shoulders are ceilings that suit us. Our eyes find varied and contrasted prospects; our steps have a lively movement. Everything is minute, but everything is big. It is a jewel-box on the human scale. It is a place of well-being, of calm and diversity, of measure and proportion, of thoroughly human dimensions. Harmony. All of us unanimous in recognising and proclaiming this.50 The Swiss poet Romain Rolland, who had a house in Vézelay, also formed a positive view of Badovici’s house. Writing of a visit on 23 April 1941, he related: The house is tiny, all glazed on the north side in the Corbusian manner. A most ingenious use is made of every nook and cranny. He is less rigorous than Le Corbusier, whom he admires unreservedly as the greatest genius of our time, and combines old and new in his furnishings … The ingenious and complicated details betray an extraordinary sense of practicality. It’s a series of ‘Open Sesames’. Walls open and close, interlock and interpenetrate, so that a single space can be transformed into many compartments.51 Rolland then added that during the same visit Badovici ‘showed us at some length the plans and photos for his villa at Cap-Martin’. Once again, Gray is not mentioned and one is forced to conclude that Badovici – typically presented as a rather innocent, dreamy romantic and consistent patron of her work – in fact made little effort to promote Gray’s designs among his friends. Caroline Constant believes that Gray collaborated significantly to the drafting of the early publications by Badovici and even assigns joint authorship to them. Given that the manuscripts are all in Badovici’s hand, we should remain sceptical about this claim until aa files 74 further evidence emerges. The manuscript drafts for texts on André Groult, the atelier Martine, Francis Jourdain, Mallet-Stevens, Ruhlmann, Chareau, Michel Dufet, Suzanne Valadon are in the Getty Research Institute. These are in Badovici’s hand and have no amendments by Eileen Gray. The question arises of Gray’s contribution to the texts published in L’Architecture Vivante in 1929, celebrating E-1027. The only surviving manuscript on E-1027 is in Badovici’s hand.52 This is a draft for the ‘description’ of the house, published in L’Architecture Vivante in 1929.53 The manuscript consists of 24 pages and, like his love letters, features considerable erasures and additions. Were these corrections the result of Gray’s intervention? Most of the differences between this text and the published version are simply condensations and simplifications of Badovici’s verbose writing style. For example, the manuscript text: Now is the time to shout ‘Danger!’ I believe that the avant-garde, having stripped things down and purified the interior into a single synthesis, is not doing an honest job. By trying to turn the most basic things [elements erased] of life, such as chairs, tables, beds and cupboards into sculptural forms, they have fallen into a new excess, perhaps even more damaging than the previous one [the classical plan erased]. They are corrupting public taste with their cerebral efforts, to the point where someone coming with a [honest erased] well designed, comfortable and human element will cut a miserable and reactionary figure because the elite at the head of the movement call the shots not for the common good but in order to mark each other out as different.54 Opposite: Eileen Gray & Jean Badovici, plan and elevations of main bedroom, E-1027, 1929 From Architecture Vivante, 1929 Above: Home of Yves Renaudin and Olga Battanchon, Vézelay, restored and adapted by Jean Badovici, 1927–28 © Tim Benton Becomes in print: To consider the construction of a table or a chair as a formal exercise, from the sole criterion of formal harmony, necessarily leads to excesses and illogicalities which will pervert public taste and make those who still have a sense of public utility seem reactionary.55 It is hard to see in these changes anything other than a simplification, imbued with some tact towards the leaders of the modern movement. It is of course probable that Badovici’s text was the result of discussions with Gray (the text refers constantly to ‘nous’), but it is extremely unlikely that it was dictated by her. There are too many grammatical errors and exaggerations. It is hard to imagine Eileen Gray writing, ‘Perret told me the other day: “Architecture is where you can fart at ease”.’56 An intriguing sentence cut from the printed version – regarding the need to remake the interiors on a ‘human scale’ – probably reflects Badovici’s conversations with Le Corbusier, who was discovering the charms of the simple life of the fishermen in the Bassin d’Arcachon. He wrote, ‘This is why our design has a little of the primitive in it, of the life of peasants with their equilibrium and their sense of the marvellous.’ Most authors have attributed to Gray the major role in the writing of ‘De l’éclecticisme au doute’, the article that accompanied the publication of E-1027 in L’Architecture Vivante (1929), giving Badovici the role of interlocutor in the dialogue. Unfortunately, I have not found a manuscript of this text, and it is difficult to convincingly separate the two voices in the dialogue into Gray and Badovici. It is clear from Badovici’s other writings that he was sceptical of the functionalist strand of modernist thought, as was Le Corbusier himself by 1929. Badovici had used the dialogue form in many of his essays in the 1920s, and where manuscripts exist for these texts they are entirely in his hand. ‘De l’écleticisme au doute’, then, should be read less as a conversation between Badovici and Gray and more as an opening up of the issues by both of them. It is an extremely important and subtle development of modernist thought, and many authors have analysed it in this sense. Gray is cited by Peter Adam as saying, ‘A house is not a machine for living in. It is a man’s shell’, as if this was a criticism of Le Corbusier.’57 But this is one of Le Corbusier’s favourite slogans, appearing, for example, in the opening lines of his book L’Almanach de l’Architecture Moderne (1925): The snail’s shell. We know that the snail lives in its shell. But us? From the moment when mechanisation turned society upside down, they have tried 131 to put the snail in, for example, a matchbox. Mechanisation must return the snail to its shell. A wise dream.58 By 1928, and midway through the construction of E-1027, the intimate relationship between Badovici and Gray was under strain, with Gray later referring to his ‘lies and silliness’.59 When the site for E-1027 was first purchased, Gray bought for herself another plot of land in Castellar, just outside the town of Menton, a few kilometres further up the coast. From this, it is clear that Roquebrune was never intended as their shared, permanent home. 60 Gray would build Tempe à Pailla, her house in Castellar, in 1932; before that, she seems to have occupied an existing stone farmhouse on the site, which she painted white and called ‘le bateau blanc’.61 And yet at the same time Badovici and Gray remained close (and would be so up till Badovici’s death in 1956). While working on Tempe à Pailla, Gray also designed Badovici’s new apartment in Paris on the rue Chateaubriand (Badovici later shared with Le Corbusier Gray’s text and drawings for the ingenious storage solution she devised for him there). They also visited Mexico together in 1934, and Gray would install a memento of this trip in the dining room in Castellar, where a large plan of the temple complex at Teotihuacán hung on one of the walls.62 For his part, during the house’s construction, Badovici seems to have occasionally helped Gray with building permissions and in resolving disputes with the workmen.63 He also assisted in the display of Gray’s Centre for Vacations and Leisure project, exhibited in Le Corbusier’s Pavillon des Temps Nouveaux at the 1937 Paris International Exposition. In return Gray helped Badovici present his application for patents for his lifeboat designs and for an unsinkable boat – a somewhat unfortunate metaphor – and in writing and translating into English his letters to officials in the Admiralty.64 This, then, offers some kind of historical context to the triangulated relationship between Eileen Gray, Jean Badovici and Le Corbusier. But what of Beatriz Colomina’s account of the same dynamic, ‘War on Architecture’, and its numerous siblings titled ‘Battle Lines’?65 Consistent with her titles, here Colomina constructs a web around the theme of aggression: not just of a local case of ‘breaking and entering’, but of the domestic interior as a form of ‘weapon’ (an idea she wittily supports with a more urban 132 illustration that turns the Champs Elysées into a gun barrel, with the Arc de Triomphe as its muzzle). Colomina’s mastery of visual innuendo is also evident in her use of a 1917 erotic drawing by the young Jeanneret to accompany a discussion of his much later drawings of a Spanish and an Algerian girl, made in 1931, and now lost, as recounted by the architect Jean de Maisonseul. She then expands upon this particular theme by seeking to explain Le Corbusier’s paintings in Roquebrune (which a famous photograph shows him painting naked) as a calculated aggression by Le Corbusier on Gray, comparable not only to the eroticised colonisation of Algeria – another chapter in the male assault on women’s sexuality, their identity and achievements – or to modern architecture’s more symptomatic assault on domestic space, but also, more specifically, to a form of architectural rape. Let me be clear about this. I consider E-1027 to be one of the outstanding works of modern architecture and design.66 There is an ugly side to Le Corbusier, on which I have insisted since my first book about his villas in Paris (1984). I have written another book about Le Corbusier’s paintings in E-1027 which accepts that they are an intrusion into the aesthetic of the house.67 I have also tried to explain why they were painted and to understand Le Corbusier’s frame of mind. However, the more I have gone into this, the less satisfying I have found Colomina’s arguments, and those of others who have taken a similar line. The only significant piece of correspondence between Le Corbusier and Eileen Gray in the accessible archives is a letter written on 28 April 1938, just before or just after the painting Postcard from Le Corbusier to Eileen Gray, 28 April 1938 © FLC, Paris of the first of his two mural paintings in E-1027 (Le Corbusier arrived directly from Algiers in Roquebrune on 27 April and left on 1 May). This letter stands out among Le Corbusier’s correspondence. It is very formal, addressed to ‘Mademoiselle Gray’ and includes polite references to her cooking and to E-1027. I know of no other letter to a woman with whom Le Corbusier had any sort of regular acquaintance beginning in this formal way (his usual form of address for female friends was ‘Chère amie’). He noted ‘the rare spirit which dictated all the arrangements, inside and out, and gave to the modern furnishings – the equipment – a form so dignified, so charming, so full of wit’.68 Six months later Le Corbusier wrote to Badovici from his hospital bed in St Tropez. He had just suffered a terrible accident – while swimming from the ‘green jetty’ to the ‘red jetty’ in the bay, a speedboat ran him over, cutting his head open and creating a gash in his leg that Le Corbusier later described as ‘as long as the Ville Radieuse’ (one can clearly see the scar of this wound in the famous photograph of Le Corbusier, naked, painting the second set of murals in 1939). In the letter Le Corbusier asks if Badovici could photograph the two paintings, and then adds: ‘Please convey once again to Eleen [sic] Gray my thanks for her friendship. Pierrefeu very happy to have spent some time with her.’ It is possible, therefore, that Gray had visited him in hospital. Alternatively, she may have replied to his letter of 28 April. In any case, there is still no evidence that they had met.69 Something that tends to go unsaid in accounts of the house is that the murals at Roquebrune were painted at Badovici’s request. Two years earlier, in 1936, he had invited Le Corbusier to paint a mural in his country house in Vézelay, the success of which prompted the second commission (for which Le Corbusier was meant to have been paid – he later said – with half a dozen bottles of gniole). And so Le Corbusier’s work at E-1027 arose out of an invitation – and not an invasion. In July 1941 Badovici described the resulting paintings as ‘resplendent’ and concluded: ‘it’s funny how well the paintings go with the shack and the sea… Hats off to Corbu – and a thousand thanks.’70 But at the same time Badovici was probably aware that Gray’s reaction might not be so effusive. In January 1942 Le Corbusier heard from his wife Yvonne, who wrote: ‘Bado is completely crazy. I got him scared. I told him you were perhaps going to go to St Tropez. I aa files 74 Le Corbusier, 16mm film stills showing his entrance mural at E-1027 with Madeleine Goisot, 1938 © FLC, Paris Above: Le Corbusier, Trois nus féminins accroupis, Le Piquey, c 1936 Below: Le Corbusier, mural study for E-1027, 1938 © FLC, Paris Le Corbusier, Nu féminin lisant, 1932 © FLC, Paris Above: Le Corbusier, Deux femmes assises et silhouette esquisse, 1928–29 Below: Le Corbusier, Trois personnages, 1937 © FLC, Paris know he’s petrified you might run into Gray there. I did it just to bug him. He’s still as mean as ever to Mad [Madeleine Goisot]; he pisses me off.’71 But what exactly Badovici was so afraid of is not clear. Was it about what Gray might say to Le Corbusier? Or about him giving the game away, if she was still unaware of the existence of the paintings? Architects, let’s be clear, do not own the houses they design. And although the house in Roquebrune is typically referred to as ‘Eileen Gray’s E-1027’, its owner and client was Badovici. Le Corbusier admired E-1027 and said so, but I see no reason to imagine that his decision to paint the seven mural paintings in the house in 1938 and 1939 had anything to do with Gray.72 I have tried to explain his reasons for making these paintings, which run counter to everything he published in the 1930s.73 In my view they represent an egotistical and inconsiderate gesture, encouraged by Badovici, which permitted him to express himself at a time of great personal frustration. According to Peter Adam, Gray never went back to E-1027 after 1931 and it is probable that she only found out about the paintings as late as 1946 or 1948, when Le Corbusier published them in the fourth volume of his Oeuvre Complète and in The New World of Space as well as several other publications.74 Gray might justifiably have been upset by the captions he provided for the illustrations of his paintings, in which he claims that the surfaces he painted on were ‘dull, sad walls where nothing was happening’.75 This assertion even led to an angry exchange of letters between Le Corbusier and Badovici between 1949 and 1950 and a temporary interruption in their friendship,76 though it is worth noting that nowhere in their correspondence does Badovici mention the name of Gray. Nor does her name appear in any of the accessible correspondence between Badovici and his other friends who stayed in his houses at Vézelay and Roquebrune in the 1930s or after the war. It’s as if both Badovici and Gray wanted to keep their friendship a secret. Another weapon in Colomina’s attack is the suggestion that Le Corbusier built his Cabanon in 1952 in order to ‘occupy and control the site by overlooking it’. If Colomina had visited the house, she would have realised that the Cabanon was tucked away on the other side of Thomas Rebutato’s fish restaurant and overlooked no part of the neighbouring site. The reasons for Le Corbusier’s befriending of the Rebutato family have been told elsewhere and had nothing to do with E-1027, to which he did not have ready access after 1949. But the most substantive part of Colomina’s argument in both ‘War on Architecture’ and ‘Battle Lines’ turns on the relationship between Le Corbusier’s supposed lifelong obsession with the colonised, feminine ‘other’ – his aa files 74 sketches of Algerian women – and the mural paintings he added to E-1027 in 1938 and 1939. To me, the main flaw in this argument is that it rests on the very shaky ground of an article, ‘Le Corbusier et les femmes d’Alger’, written by the artist Samir Rafi.77 An eccentric and reclusive character, Rafi established a reputation in his native Cairo before moving to Paris in the 1950s to work with the cubist painter André Lhote. He claimed to have had three interviews with Le Corbusier in April–May 1964, which he then transcribed and which Le Corbusier corrected and signed off.78 The problem is that the only surviving interview is dated 19 July 1958, and it deals solely with the purist period.79 As part of his research for a doctoral dissertation on purism, Rafi had sent Le Corbusier a long handwritten letter on 3 October 1957 introducing himself and setting out his argument – namely that Le Corbusier’s drawings were derived from his architecture and not, as Le Corbusier himself said, the other way round.80 Though he could hardly have been impressed, Le Corbusier eventually agreed to an interview. Rafi took shorthand notes, and sent a typescript to Le Corbusier, who sent it back covered in corrections: ‘I’m returning the stenographic copy to you … having crossed out the things that have nothing to do with my problem, which is a problem of architecture and urbanism. I would ask you to bear this in mind and to refrain from muddling problems which are really distinct from each other and about which you are ignorant.’81 After this discouraging start, no more interviews took place before April 1962, when Rafi wrote requesting another meeting to discuss the dates of some of his purist paintings.82 There is no evidence in the Fondation Le Corbusier of any further meetings. Rafi’s claims notwithstanding, there are reasons for doubting the veracity of his article – not just that it contains many factual errors, or that Rafi had an interest in promoting a particular argument, but that almost all the documentary evidence seems to have disappeared. Moreover, there is a very obvious value judgement to be made about the drawings he published as evidence of his argument. Rafi claimed to have heard from Le Corbusier’s own lips that he had drawn ‘hundreds’ of sketches of Algerian women in three sketchbooks, beginning in 1929. In fact, Le Corbusier’s first trip to Algiers was in 1931, followed by further trips in 1933, 1934 and 1938. But these sketchbooks have disappeared. The two known sketchbooks from the first two trips were recently published by Danièle Pauly.83 Out of 160 pages of drawings, only seven include nudes. Nevertheless, Rafi argues that it was the experience of sketching the women in Algiers that changed Le Corbusier’s painting style and introduced him to the nude. He writes ‘these sketches mark a turning point in the evolution of Le Corbusier; they are the first time in his career that he made these studies of the nude after nature’.84 He then continues: ‘But this discovery of the human body was made in parallel with the discovery of the organic, human-scale architecture of the Casbah.’85 All this is completely wrong. Le Corbusier drew nudes and sketches of ‘organic’ vernacular architecture throughout his life. It is also nonsensical to assert, as Rafi does, that, Le Corbusier ‘would never again have the opportunity to start again [drawing nudes], and the nudes that one finds in his canvases after 1929 are all taken from the three sketchbooks he made in Algeria’.86 In fact, largely from 1926 onwards, Le Corbusier was drawing nudes, mostly at Le Piquey on the Bassin d’Arcachon, that would be incorporated into paintings such as Les Deux Lutteuses, 1927–28.87 He also made a series of sketches of Josephine Baker and her troupe in the review La Folie du Jour at the Folies Bergère in 1926, and worked these up into an album of 50 watercolours for his friend Marcel Levaillant, including several of Baker nude.88 At the same time he sketched nudes, probably in brothels, on his travels in Spain, Argentina and Brazil between 1928 and 1929. The inspiration for the greater majority of his other nude drawings and paintings was overwhelmingly his future wife Yvonne and the working women he studied at Le Piquey, which he observed and sketched as if nude.89 In reality, the seed of Le Corbusier’s mural paintings in Roquebrune is not so much the women he sketched in North Africa, as what Pauly calls ‘Les Géantes’.90 These include several drawings of a seated woman reading a book, foreshadowing the right-hand figure in the mural. There are also several drawings in which Le Corbusier begins to make compositions out of two or three figures. 91 And yet, still according to Rafi, on Le Corbusier’s return to Paris the drawings of Algerian women became entwined with an obsessive study of Delacroix’s Femmes d’Alger, hanging in the Louvre. None of these studies survive. Le Corbusier is supposed to have drawn and redrawn these figures on tracing paper between 1929 and 1937, returning to the theme in the 1960s, only to burn them at the end of his life. The sole evidence they ever existed is Rafi’s article, with its illustrations of eight sketches – to which we will return. On the other hand, the composition of ‘Trois personnages’ did occupy Le Corbusier in the 1930s. A painting with this title, dated ‘1937’ by Le Corbusier, is discussed by Jean-Pierre and Naïma Jornod in their two-volume Catalogue Raisonné.92 The Jornods identify seven studies for Trois personnages, none of which bear any resemblance to Algerian or Moroccan women.93 One of these studies indicates the beams from a rustic 137 Le Corbusier, mural (above) next to entrance to guest bedroom and (below) next to main entrance, E-1027, 1939 (both now destroyed) © FLC, Paris Le Corbusier, murals in the guest bedroom (top left), in the entrance (top right), in the living room (bottom right), and next to the bar (bottom left), E-1027, 1938–39 © Manuel Bougot shed, which probably locates it among the sketches at Le Piquey, which Le Corbusier visited for the last time in September 1936.94 On another drawing, the representation of a book prefigures the curious ‘swastika’-shape motif in the right-hand woman. Despite this, Colomina centres her argument on the femmes de la Casbah drawings of Algerian women that may or may not have existed in the mysterious three sketchbooks that Rafi refers to, and which she certainly had not seen. Nevertheless she feels able to assert: The whole mentality of the femmes de la Casbah drawings is photographic. Not only are they made from photographs, they develop according to a repetitive process in which the images are systematically reproduced on transparent paper, the grid of the original graph paper allowing the image to be enlarged to any scale.95 It is true, as Pauly and Stanislaus von Moos have long since demonstrated, that Le Corbusier made some drawings based on the postcards he bought in Algiers.96 But this has nothing to do with the drawings of Algerian women to which Rafi refers. Colomina continues: This photographic sensibility becomes most obvious with the murals at Cap Martin… Le Corbusier used an electric projector to enlarge the image of a small drawing onto the 2.5m × 4m wall where he etched the mural in black… The mural was a black-and-white photograph.97 Colomina turns everything into photographs, but this is going too far. Once again, this idea may have derived from Rafi, who wrote: ‘On the white wall of a house at Cap Martin, 2.5m by 4m, he enlarged his drawing by means of an electric projector.’98 It is hard to know what kind of projector Rafi had in mind – presumably it was an epidiascope – or indeed how Le Corbusier could have found room for such a device in his suitcase on his trip to Algiers, since Roquebrune was his first stop directly after leaving the boat. More fundamentally, Colomina seems to be confusing the mural made by Le Corbusier with a crude copy made by the local house painter Jean Broniarsky. Although Le Corbusier restored the mural in 1949, it continued to deteriorate. In 1978 a new wall was constructed in front of the original and Broniarsky made a copy based on a slide projection of the original, incising the lines heavily into the plaster. Colomina’s use of the word ‘etched’ suggests that she is indeed referring to the reproduction, rather than the original. Even though Le Corbusier sometimes referred to this mural as a s’graffitte, he did not incise the lines into the plaster, but painted directly onto the surface of the wall. Just after executing the painting in April 1938, he took 127 photographs of the mural with his cine camera.99 On some of these photographs you can see traces of the charcoal lines he had sketched freehand on the wall. Colomina also drew attention to the so-called 140 ‘swastika’ motif in the figure on the right. This was accentuated by Broniarsky when he repainted the mural in 1978 and further highlighted by a young man who squatted the house in the 1980s and picked out some of the lines in white. A further aspect of Rafi’s argument, and essential for Colomina’s interpretation, is that the monochrome mural executed by Le Corbusier on a wall under the pilotis of E-1027 in 1938 is directly related to the Femmes d’Alger project and his sketches of Algerian women.100 Seizing on Rafi’s claim that Le Corbusier drew and redrew his sketches on tracing paper, Colomina goes on to imply a mechanical routine similar to photography: Le Corbusier’s violation of Eileen Gray’s house and identity is consistent with his fetishisation of Algerian women… In these terms, the endless Three drawings published by Samir Rafi in his article ‘Le Corbusier et les femmes d’Alger’ and attributed by him to Le Corbusier, 1968 drawing and redrawing is the scene of a violent substitution that in Le Corbusier would seem to require the house, domestic space, as prop.101 Colomina also takes at face value the strange explanation of the mural painting by Madame Schelbert, who had purchased the house in 1960. According to her, one of the three women, on the right, represents Badovici, while another was Gray (both of whom Schelbert had never met), while the head of the third woman represents the child they never had.102 This, according to Colomina, constitutes an attack on Gray’s bisexuality. And yet it is extremely unlikely that Le Corbusier would have intended to represent Gray in this painting; the woman at Badovici’s side during the period of their friendship was Madeleine Goisot. Furthermore, as we have seen, the mural painting was based on a previous oil painting, Trois personnages (1937), which had no connection whatsoever with Roquebrune or with Badovici, and was more closely associated with Le Piquey.103 Rafi illustrates eight drawings on tracing paper which he claims were part of the femmes de la Casbah set. They have nothing to do with Eugène Delacroix’s Femmes d’Alger and do not look like sketches from life: to my eye, they are crude copies and variations of the mural. Danièle Pauly, who wrote her thesis on Le Corbusier’s drawings, has not included these sketches in the Fondation Le Corbusier’s catalogue raisonné and considers them to be fakes.104 Apart from the details copied literally from the mural (profile of the right-hand woman’s face, the repeated motif of the hand, the left-hand woman’s breasts, and so on) there is nothing in these drawings that looks convincingly like Le Corbusier’s hand. One of them is clearly a later drawing derived from the mural at Roquebrune, complete with the ‘swastika’ motif. A tell-tale detail is the shape to the left of the woman’s face, which represents the foot and knee of the missing central character. Rafi clearly did not know how to fill in this part of the sketch. Rafi’s biographer, the Egyptian artist Abdel Razeq Okasha, made friends with the reclusive artist in the last two years of his life. He recalled: ‘Rafi had always been confused and bewildered; he used to document everything on pieces of paper, scattered all over his tiny house. He was a closet of secrets that I was never able to unlock, despite the fact that I might have been the only one allowed to enter his third-floor studio.’105 Rafi liked to copy other artists’ work and was criticised for it, but defended this practice; it was ‘part of the attempt to benefit from a collective approach’.106 Again, Rafi might have been completely sincere and accurately remembered things Le Corbusier told him, but there is good reason to doubt it. Nevertheless, Colomina continues to bring together ideas and associations which have very aa files 74 Transcript of interview of Le Corbusier by Samir Rafi with Le Corbusier’s comments, returned to Rafi on 19 July 1958 © FLC, Paris 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 142 I would like to thank Maristella Casciato, Caroline Constant, Tag Gronberg, Mary McLeod, Josep Quetglas, Danièle Pauly, Cloé Pitiot, Stanislaus von Moos and Thomas Weaver for their very helpful advice and comments on the text. Abbreviations: GRi (Getty Research Institute, Badovici collection, 880412; the material is arranged in boxes and folders; the documents are not identified individually); NMieG (National Museum of Ireland, Eileen Gray Collection); V&A (V&A Museum Archive, Eileen Gray Collection; all document references cited here should be prefixed with aaD/1980). The phrasing is taken from an American review of Gray’s shop (Chicago Tribune, 7 June 1922), titled ‘Odd Designs at Art Studio of Jean Désert; Furniture in Bizarre Forms and Styles’, where visiting the shop is described as ‘an experience with the unheard of and a sojourn into the never-before-seen’. The first of these articles, ‘Les pieds dans le plat…’ was published in L’Esprit Nouveau 18, issued on 1 November 1923. Le Corbusier, ‘Salon d’Automne’, L’Esprit Nouveau 19, 1 December 1923, np. Le Corbusier, ‘L’art décoratif d’aujourd’hui’, L’Esprit Nouveau 24, 1 June 1924, np. The reference to Adolf Loos is to his article ‘Ornament et crime’, published in French in Les Cahiers d’aujourd’hui (no 5, June 1913), and reprinted in L’Esprit Nouveau 2 (15 November 1920). Jean Badovici, seven-page manuscript headed ‘Eillen Gray’, GRi, box 1, 3 ms folder ii, notes, nd. This seems to be a first draft for the text published in L’Architecture Vivante in 1924. Orla Brady plays a soulful Eileen Gray, Francesco Scianna a rakish Badovici, Vincent Perez a forever youthful Le Corbusier and Dominique Pinon plays Fernand Léger as a peacemaker. Léger, Le Corbusier and Badovici certainly met in 1936 or 1937 to discuss the pros and cons of mural painting, since Badovici wrote about this discussion in an article (‘Peinture murale ou peinture spatiale’, L'Architecture d’Aujourd’hui , March 1937, p 75) but they certainly never met together at E-1027. Beatriz Colomina, ‘Battle Lines E-1027’, Centre: A Journal for Architecture in America, no 9 (1995), pp 22–31. Reprinted as ‘War on Architecture: E-1027: House Designed by Eileen Gray at Cap Martin’, Assemblage 20, April 1993, pp 28–29; ‘Battle Lines: E-1027’, in Diana Agrest, Patricia Conway and Leslie Kanes Weisman (eds), The Sex of Architecture (New York, NY: Harry N Adams, 1996), pp 167–90; ‘Battle Lines: E-1027’, in Francesca Hughes, The Architect: Reconstructing Her Practice (Cambridge, Ma: MiT Press, 1996); and in Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media (Cambridge, Ma: MiT Press, 1994). A French version, with a three-sentence introduction, was published as ‘Une maison malfamée: E-1027’, in Tracés, 2015, in the Revue d’esthétique (edited by Jacques Fol and Christian Girard, 1997) and again in Michael Speaks (ed), The Critical 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. Landscape (Rotterdam: O1O, 1996). See also the more nuanced piece, Lynne Walker, ‘Architecture and Reputation: Eileen Gray, Gender and Modernism’, in Brenda Martin and Penny Sparke (eds), Women’s Places: Architecture and Design 1860–1960 (London: Routledge, 2003), pp 87–111. An early critique of Colomina’s article was written by Françoise Fromonot, who deplored the mishandling of source material and apparent lack of interest in Gray’s own architecture (‘Sexe et architecture: Ubu reine’, L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, 311, June 1997). Jennifer Goff, Eileen Gray: Her Work and Her World (Kildare: Irish Academic Press, 2015), p 337. Ibid, p 337. The role of Natalie Clifford Barney in bringing together leading figures in what has been described as ‘Sapphic Modernism’ has been well described in Jasmine Rault’s book, Eileen Gray and the Design of Sapphic Modernity Staying In (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011). Rault also provides a good bibliography on leading women in avant-garde Paris. A large number of documents referring to Eileen Gray and Jean Badovici were inaccessible to me at the point of writing. Peter Adam is reputed to have a collection of over 1,000 letters from and to Eileen Gray. An important collection of Badovici’s documents are in the Centre Pompidou archives but only some have been made available to researchers. Another collection, in the possession of Renaud Barrès, is also inaccessible for the time being. It may be that answers to some of the questions posed in this article will emerge from these collections. Le Corbusier’s ‘agendas’ of the 1920s and 1930s were not conventional diaries. Simple notebooks, they were filled in from the front with meetings and from the back with sketches and notes for lectures or articles. To date the pages require a good knowledge of Le Corbusier’s correspondence and movements. Frances Stonor Saunders, ‘The House that Eileen Built’, Guardian Weekend, 21 July 2001, pp 31–37, p 33. Saunders went on to claim that Gray and Badovici published L’Arhitecture Vivante together, which is certainly untrue. See interview by Mo Teitelbaum, ‘Lady of the Rue Bonaparte’, Sunday Times Magazine, 22 June 1975, pp 28–33. Teitelbaum paraphrases Gray: ‘It was in that house by the sea that she put into practise her humanistic approach to architecture, for which Le Corbusier was to applaud her, to become her friend. ‘Yes we were good friends, but we saw so little of each other, you know. He was always travelling … all over the world.’ In this interview Gray made no mention of her discontent with Le Corbusier’s paintings. Nor did she mention them in the brief interview that she gave to Charlotte Benton and myself in 1974. NMieG 2004-, 75 aaD/1980/9/2. Albert Boeken sent a manuscript review of her work at the 1923 Salon d’Automne to Gray on 5 January 1924 (V&A) and there is a clipping by G de Pawlowski of the Salon d’Automne of 1922 noting some pieces of furniture, 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. carpets and lacquerwork by Gray. Pawlowski was highly critical of Le Corbusier’s diorama of the Cité contemporaine de trois millions d’habitants at the same exhibition, calling it the ‘ruins of Palmyra in the plain’. Note on a scrap of paper referring to the Philips Pavilion, ‘Elen Grey 21 rue Bonaparte’, flC E2(3)481. Badovici, seven-page manuscript (GRi 880412, box 1, 3ms, folder ii notes nd, and also in typescript in the V&A archive. Waldemar George, ‘Le 14e Salon des artistes décorateurs’, Ère Nouvelle, 8 May 1923. Louis Vauxcelles, ‘La vie artistique’, L’Amour de l’Art, November 1920, pp 243–45. Le Corbusier and André Maurois, Des Canons, Des Munitions? Merci! Des Logis… S V P Monographie Du ‘Pavillon Des Temps Nouveaux’, À l’Exposition Internationale, ‘Art Et Technique’, De Paris 1937, collection de l’équipement de la civilisation machiniste (Boulogne: L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, 1938), p 96. The fact that Le Corbusier agreed to place Gray’s magnificent model and drawings of this project alongside plans by members of CiaM no doubt reflects the intervention of Badovici, but also the appropriateness of the subject to the political theme of the pavilion. The introduction of paid holidays by the Front Populaire was an extremely popular move. See Caroline Constant and Jacques Bosser, Eileen Gray (London: Phaidon, 2003), pp 175–77. flC e1(5)7. flC e1(05)10. flC e1(5)11. flC e1(5)12 and flC e1(5)13. GRi, box 1, 3ms folder notebooks, nd; subfolder notebook no 3, green notebook, ‘Pax Labor’. In 1925, Badovici published the Ozenfant studio, the villa ‘Le Lac’ at Corseaux and the Esprit Nouveau Pavilion and in 1926 the Ternisien studio and the villas La Roche-Jeanneret, but these issues were dominated by the work of the Dutch, German and Russian modernists (L’Architecture Vivante, 1925 (I), pp 20–22 and 1925(ii) pp 30–32 and 37–39, 1926 (ii) pp 14–18). Jean Badovici and Raoul Dufy, Intérieurs Français (Paris: Éditions Albert Morancé, 1925). Gray annotated two of the pochoir coloured plates of her furniture in her edition of this album, complaining of mis-representations in the colouring (NMieG). Letter of 14 December 1934 (flC e1(5)16, addressed to ‘cher Bado’ and inviting him to dinner). In some lecture notes dated 8 January 1934, Le Corbusier mentions ‘Badovici, Vézelay’ as a topic (flC B2(11)12). The first definite document is from 8 June 1935 – a telegram in which Le Corbusier announces his imminent arrival by car to Vézelay (flC e1(5)18). From a set of pencil notes, of which one refers to the date 1934 and another refers to Le Corbusier’s accident in August 1938 (GRi, box 1, 3ms, ii misc notes, nd). As late as 16 July 1928 Le Corbusier still addresses him as ‘Monsieur Badovici’ and signs formally (‘Croyez, cher monsieur à mes meilleurs sentiments’ and with his real name rather than aa files 74 ‘Corbu’ (flC e1(05)10). 30. GRi, box 6. 31. GRi, box 1, 3ms, folder notebooks, nd; subfolder, notebook no 4, loose items. 32. GRi, box 1, 3ms, notebooks, nd, notebook no 2, loose items. 33. GRi, box 6. 34. Ibid. The first letter in the sequence is addressed to ‘mademoiselle, ou Jacqueline tout court’. The correspondence must date from 1928–30 because in one letter he offers to send her ‘un beau livre que j’ai publié il y a 4 ans tout en couleur’. This book must be the album, Intérieurs Français, published by Albert Morancé in 1925. 35. GRi Box 6. 36. GRi, box 6. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid. 39. This phrase was repeated in letters to Lia, probably August 1929 (GRi, box 6) and to Jacqueline. 40. GRi, box 9. 41. GRi, box 6. 42. Le Corbusier to Badovici, 8 July 1949 (flC e1(5)74). 43. Renaud Barrès, Christian Derouet, Elise Koering and Cloé Pitiot have all had access to documents I have not seen, and we can expect publications from them which will certainly go further than these preliminary notes. I have only had access to those documents in the V&A, the Museum of Ireland and the Bibliothèque Kandinsky in the Centre Georges Pompidou that have been put online and the Badovici collection at the Getty Research Institute. Christian Derouet, consultant to the Musée Christian Zervos at Vézelay, organised an important exhibition and catalogue. See Christian Derouet, Le Corbusier à Vézelay (Vézelay: Musée Zervos, Fondation Le Corbusieer, 2015). 44. One letter, from Badovici in Roquebrune to Olga, is dated 14 April 1928 (CGP 1_47). 45. Christian Derouet, op cit, p 7. 46. See the letter from one of Badovici’s relatives, probably his uncle Iorgu, to Badovici on 25 March 1928, referring to the sale of the family home, after a legal case to eject a sitting tenant (GRi, box 6). The house was sold for 1,250,000 lei, with perhaps some deductions. I am deeply indebted to Stefania Kenley for translating and interpreting the Badovici correspondence in Romanian. 47. Gray is not consistent with the writing of the number 7; see for instance her sketch for the de Stijl table (V&A, 9-172-2). But in most of her drawings, the sevens are unbarred (eg, plan for camping unit, NMieG, 2000-96) or her letter of 22 March 1943 (NMieG, 2000-193-001). It is less clear whether she ever used the continental comma for the decimal point. 48. Note the J (‘Jacqueline’ in the letter, ‘jardin’ in the sketch), the B (‘bravo’ in the letter, ‘bar’ in the sketch) and the D (‘Daudet’ in the letter, ‘du’ and ‘divan in the sketch). 49. Tim Benton, ‘The Villa De Mandrot and the Place of the Imagination’, in Michel Richard (ed), Massilia (Marseille: Éditions Imbernon, 2011), pp 92–105. 50. Le Corbusier, The Radiant City: Elements of a Doctrine of Urbanism to Be Used as the Basis of Our Machine-Age aa files 74 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. Civilisation (New York, NY: Orion Press, 1967), pp 54–55. Romain Rolland and Jean Lacoste, Journal de Vézelay 1938–1944 (Paris: Bartillat, 2013). I would like to thank Cloé Pitiot for first drawing my attention to this text. Eileen Gray and Jean Badovici, ‘E-1027: Maison en Bord de Mer’, L’Architecture Vivante, 1929, pp 11–26 (reprinted, Marseille: Édition Imbernon, 2006). GRi/box 2, copy 1. L’Architectre Vivante, 1929, op cit. GRi Box 2, Copy 1. Peter Adam, Eileen Gray, Architect/ Designer: A Biography (London: Thames & Hudson, revised edition 2000), p 309. Adam does not give the source. Le Corbusier. Almanach D’Architecture Moderne (Paris: G Crès & cie, 1925), p 5. Peter Adam, Eileen Gray: Architect/ Designer – A Biography (London: Thames & Hudson, 2000), p 256. The purchase of the site for Tempe à Pailla dates from 30 March 1926 (information generously supplied by Renaud Barrès). On 24 April Gray purchased three adjoining plots in order to protect the view. Caroline Constant and Jacques Bosser, op cit, p 146. Adam says that Gray continued to live in E-1027 until 1932 (Peter Adam, op cit, p 117). They also travelled together to Peru (1929), Stuttgart (1927), Berlin (1931), and Mexico and New York (1934). See Peter Adam, op cit, pp 114–15 and 128. A draft of the contract for the sale of land for Tempe à Pailla is in Badovici’s hand (GRi, box 6). For example, letter from Gray to the secretary of the Admiralty, 30 April 1939 (GRi, box 6). Beatriz Colomina’s writing on E-1027, continually reprinted, is taken as gospel and therefore no longer queried or checked. For instance, the Wikipedia page on Jean Badovici cites her in asserting that Le Corbusier was not ‘granted full authorisation' for painting his murals in E-1027, which is untrue as they were in fact the result of a direct commission. For a more general text on Colomina’s writing and scholarship, see Sylvia Lavin, ‘Colomina's Web: Reply to Beatriz Colomina’, in Diana Agrest, Patricia Conway and Leslie Kanes Weisman, op cit, pp 183–90, in which Lavin writes of the ‘extraordinary qualities of Colomina’s cloth’, and ‘the huge, almost promiscuous number of threads that she has joined together in their making’. I have relied on Jennifer Goff’s biography, although I differ slightly on some questions of interpretation. Equally important is the exhibition catalogue – Cloé Pitiot and Jennifer Laurent, Eileen Gray (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2013) and Caroline Constant, Eileen Gray, op cit. Tim Benton, Le Corbusier Peintre à Cap Martin (Paris: Éditions du Patrimoine, 2015). See also Christopher Eric Morgan Pearson, ‘Integrations of Art and Architecture in the Work of Le Corbusier’s Theory and Practice from Ornamentalism to the “Synthesis of the Major Arts”,’ PhD, Stanford University, 1995. Gray kept this letter and donated it to the Fondation Le Corbusier after his death (flC e2(3)478). 69. Letter from Le Corbusier to Jean Badovici, c 6 October 1938 (flC e1(5)111). 70. Jean Badovici letter to Le Corbusier, July 1941 (flC e1(5)49). Baraque (shack) is the word used by Le Corbusier, Badovici and Gray herself to describe E-1027. 71. Letter from Yvonne to Le Corbusier, 6 January 1942 (flC R1(12)177). 72. There are eight murals, if you count the painting of the pebble next to the mural under the pilotis. 73. Tim Benton, op cit. 74. Le Corbusier, Oeuvre complète, 1938–1946 (Zurich: Artemis, 1946), pp 158–61, Le Corbusier, New World of Space (New York, NY: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1948); André Bloc (ed), ‘Le Corbusier (Numéro hors série)’, L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui 19 (April 1948) and Stamo Papadaki and Joseph Hudnut, Le Corbusier Architect, Painter, Writer (New York, NY: Macmillan, 1948). 75. Le Corbusier, op cit, p 158. See also ‘The mural paintings brightened only the most unpleasing walls of the house. The “good walls” remained white.’ Le Corbusier, New World of Space, op cit, p 99. 76. Tim Benton, op cit, pp 78–82. 77. Samir Rafi, ‘Le Corbusier et les femmes d’Alger’, Revue d’histoire et de la civilisation du Maghreb (January 1968), pp 50–66. See also Stanislaus von Moos, ‘Les femmes d’Alger’, in Danièle Pauly (ed), Le Corbusier et la Méditerranée (Marseille: Parenthèse, 1987), pp 191–209. 78. Alex Gerber, who wrote a thesis on Le Corbusier’s trips to Algeria from 1931 onwards, knew Rafi and backed up his claim that he had a continuous correspondence with Le Corbusier in the 1960s. See Alex Gerber, ‘L’Algérie de Le Corbusier: Les Voyages de 1931’, thesis, ePfl, Lausanne, 1993, p 46. 79. flC e2(20)4 and e2(20)7-001-009. The only other record of Samir Rafi’s name in the Fondation Le Corbusier is a pen note by Le Corbusier following up the interview on purism, explaining the joint authorship of the book La Peinture Moderne (flC e2(20)16). 80. flC e2(20)381-385. 81. flC e2(20)7-006. 82. flCT2(05)18. In a manuscript note, Le Corbusier says only that some of the dates of his paintings published in L’Esprit Nouveau were wrong and offers some information on La Peinture Moderne, explaining that all the chapters were written together with Ozenfant, except for chapter iX on purism, written by Ozenfant (E2(20)16, undated). 83. Danièle Pauly, Le Corbusier Albums D’Afrique du Nord (Brussels: Fondation Le Corbusier et aaM Editions, 2013). The 1931 album is reproduced on pp 47–107, the 1933 album on pp 109–209. 84. Samir Rafi, op cit, p 52. 85. Ibid. 86. Ibid, p 53 87. Naïma Jornod, Jean-Pierre Jornod and Le Corbusier, Le Corbusier (Charles Edouard Jeanneret): Catalogue Raisonné de L’Oeuvre Peint (Milan: Skira, 2005), vol 1, p 421. 88. Danièle Pauly, Le Corbusier et le dessin (Paris: Fage éditions, 2015), pp 214–18. 89. Ibid, pp 202–07. 90. Danièle Pauly, Le Corbusier, Le Jeu du Dessin (Paris: Éditions Hazan, 2015), pp 84–91. 91. I would like to thank Danièle Pauly for her expert help with these drawings. 92. Naïma Jornod, Jean-Pierre Jornod and Le Corbusier, op cit, p 196 (flC 455). See also Tim Benton, op cit, pp 62–67. Another version of this composition is Jornod cat 198 (flC 376). 93. flC 434, 1430, 435, 348, 3067, 1196 and a pen sketch in a private collection. To these should be added flC 142, 1403, 6152. flC 3618 is probably a later study for the painting ‘Trois figures Bado’ of 1943, along with flC 20 and 3915. 94. See Tim Benton, LC Foto: Le Corbusier, Secret Photographer (Baden: Lars Müller, 2013). 95. Beatriz Colomina, ‘Battle Lines: E-1027’, in Francesca Hughes, op cit, p 19. 96. See for example the sketches flC 114, 2564 and 1023 copied from coloured postcards, discussed in Danièle Pauly, Le Corbusier et le Dessin ce Labeur Secret, op cit, pp 22629. See also Stanislaus von Moos, ‘Le Corbusier as Painter’, Oppositions 19/20 (1980), p 91. 97. Beatriz Colomina, in Francesca Hughes, op cit, p 19. 98. Samir Rafi, op cit, p 59. 99. See Tim Benton, LC Foto, op cit, pp 386–88 and 398–99. 100. The monochrome mural painting under the pilotis of E-1027 does not have an official title. Le Corbusier referred to it as a s’graffitte, although it did not use this technique. 101. Beatriz Colomina, in Francesca Hughes, op cit, p 17. 102. Eileen Gray sold the house Tempe à Pailla at Castellar, near Menton, to the English artist Graham Sutherland in 1954. 103. Badovici published a drawing by Le Corbusier of the composition of the mural in his album Oeuvre Plastique Peintures et Dessins – Architecture (Paris: A Morancé, variously dated 1938 and 1939). 104. Stanislaus von Moos, who accepts the credibility of Rafi’s evidence, still acknowledges that ‘some of the drawings illustrated by Rafi … are fakes’ – Stanislaus von Moos, Le Corbusier: Elements of a Synthesis (Rotterdam: 010, 2009), p 351, n 42. 105. Abdel Razeq Okasha, Memories and Works of Samir Rafi (Cairo: GeBO, 2013). See also the review by Rania Khallaf in Al Ahram weekly, 3–9 January 2013, http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/News/813. aspx. 106. Ibid. 107. Beatriz Colomina, in Francesca Hughes, op cit, pp 21–22. 108. General Pierre Bosquet, commenting on the disastrous charge of the English light cavalry during the Battle of Balaclava in the Crimean War, 1854: ‘C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerrre: c’est de la folie.’ Le Corbusier, 16mm film stills, E-1027, 1938 © FLC, Paris 143