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4/6/2007

Le Corbusier

Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid

Heidi Weber Museum and Collection

Between 1958 and 1965 -the last seven years of his life- Le Corbusier (La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland, 1887 – Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, France, 1965) was a close personal and business friend of Heidi Weber, the Swiss owner of a gallery of interior decoration in Zurich. Heidi Weber felt deep admiration not only for Le Corbusier’s architecture but also, and more particularly, for his furniture and other artwork (little known of at that time) which she proposed to promote.

In 1959 she obtained an agreement from Le Corbusier allowing her to produce and market the metal furniture he had designed in 1929, doing so very successfully until 1962. Similarly, she immediately began to promote exhibitions of his paintings, sculpture, tapestries, graphic work, enamels, etc., devoting almost her whole time to publicizing the work of her admired artist-architect.

Le Corbusier, who had always insisted on the idea of the unity of the arts, that it was impossible to be a good architect if one did not possess deep aesthetic sensitivity and that the key to his architecture was to be sought in his painting, finally fulfilled his long- frustrated aspiration of seeing his contribution in these fields recognized.

A large part of the Le Corbusier works exhibited by Heidi Weber ultimately enlarged her personal collection of the master’s output, a collection which was to become the most important group of Le Corbusier works outside the Le Corbusier Foundation in Paris.
In 1960, however, Heidi Weber went one step further: she offered Le Corbusier a commission for a building that was neither a private villa, nor a museum in the traditional sense (something Le Corbusier always detested), but an art centre that would provide space for a wide variety of contemporary artistic activities. This was how La Maison de l'Homme or Centre Le Corbusier-Heidi Weber Museum was conceived. Built between 1961 and 1967 (and therefore inaugurated after the architect’s death in August 1965), the Zurich pavilion -with its spectacular independent metal roof, two floors of cube modules, vibrant glass façades and coloured enamelled steel- is a true summary of Le Corbusier’s architectural concepts, and made this posthumous work the final link in that synthesis of the arts he pursued during his whole career.

This exhibition comprises a wide selection of Heidi Weber’s collection of Le Corbusier works -paintings, sculptures, drawings, tapestries, enamels, engravings, lithographs and furniture. Various original documents concerning the construction of the Zurich pavilion are also included. The only piece on show not from the Heidi Weber Collection is The Fall of Barcelona, painted in 1939 by Le Corbusier, deeply affected by the fall of the city to Franco. This picture now belongs to the Reina Sofía Collection having been generously donated by Heidi Weber herself in 1987.

In its design, the installation likewise attempts to reflect Le Corbusier’s ideas as regards the exhibition of works of art, a field in which he wished to escape from the monumentalism of museums and recover something of the domestic scale. The works are thus exhibited in more intimate surroundings and at a lower height than usual, in areas that give an idea of the Modulor standard measure ( 2.26 m. height as a basic element) as it was applied in the Zurich building. From the latter the imposing ramp has been brought and installed in the centre of the room.

Thus, both the grouping of the works and their spatial arrangement have been determined in homage to that phrase of Le Corbusier’s that Heidi Weber made hers and printed on the title-page of the catalogue of her collection: "There is no sculptor only, painter only, architect only. The creative event takes place in ‘ONE FORM ' in the service of poetry".

Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia
Santa Isabel, 52 - Madrid
Mondays to Saturdays: 10.00 - 21.00; Sundays: 10.00 - 14.30; Close on Tuesday

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