Deux figures au tronc d'arbre jaune

Produced during a period of intensive experimentation in Le Corbusier’s painting, Deux figures au tronc d’arbre jaune illustrates the growing freedom and intuitive manner of the artist’s style through the 1930s. Included in an important retrospective of his work held in Zurich in 1938, this large and impressive composition presents Le Corbusier’s favoured motif of this period: the female nude. From the late 1920s onwards, the human figure dominated Le Corbusier’s plastic oeuvre, portrayed in a manner which, though sharing similarities with the contemporaneous work of Léger and Picasso, was entirely unique to the artist.
Following the First World War, Le Corbusier had collaborated with Amédée Ozenfant to found Purism, a movement that built on the practices of Cubism and called for order, logic and rational thought in the creation of art. As the two artists emphatically stated in their text ‘Après le Cubisme’ of 1919: ‘The work should not be accidental, exceptional, impressionistic… picturesque, but on the contrary general, static, expressive of what is constant… PURISM fears the bizarre and the “original.” It seeks out pure elements with which to reconstruct organized paintings’ (quoted in C. Eliel, L’Esprit Nouveau: Purism in Paris, 1918-1925, exh. cat., Los Angeles, 2001, pp. 165-166). Following his creative break with Ozenfant in 1925 however, Le Corbusier began to adopt a freer painterly idiom in his work, looking primarily to nature for inspiration. While his Purist compositions had focused on still lifes of functional, mass-produced objects – such as modern glasses, carafes and siphons – he now began to integrate more organic forms into his art, most notably the statuesque female form.
In the same way that his Purist works had exuded a cold sense of restraint and control, Le Corbusier’s paintings of women saw him plunge into a realm of rich sensuality, passion and femininity. Nude and clothed, stationary and in motion, dancing or reclining, the female figure appeared in numerous guises in his painting, infusing Le Corbusier’s art with a new softness. Inspired by the people he saw on the beach in Le Piquey, where he holidayed in the south of France, as well as on his travels through South America, Le Corbusier filled numerous sketch books with drawings of female figures. His wife, Yvonne Gallis, whom he married in 1930, often served as the model for many of these works. His focus on this subject allowed Le Corbusier to explore concepts of the surreal and the fantastic, as well as the erotic in his work, notions far removed from his public architectural projects. As such, paintings like Deux figures au tronc d’arbre jaune provide an important glimpse into the private realm of Le Corbusier, immersing the viewer into the world of his vivid imagination.
Here, two nude female figures serve as the abstracted protagonists of the scene. Deftly constructed from a combination of flat planes of primary colours and intersecting biomorphic and geometric lines, these figures stand in profile, situated between a doorway on the right and a bold yellow tree trunk on the left. With their features just visible, their hands seem to meet in the centre of the composition, the left-hand figure clutching a small stylised branch with leaves. In contrast with the undulating forms of their bodies, horizontal lines at the top and bottom of the composition lock these figures into their setting, a beam-lined ceiling above and sharp horizontal line below framing the pair and lending this work a strong sense of structure.
Dating from the apogee of this so-called ‘Femmes’ period that stretched from 1932 to 1937, the composition recalls an earlier painting of 1936 entitled Deux femmes à la branche (N. Jornod & J-P. Jornod, no. 179; Private collection). In this work, two central figures are pictured clutching the same branch as in the present painting and are rendered with a similar combination of colours and stylised forms. Yet, while in this earlier work the nude figures are clearly demarcated with a single outline, in Deux figures au tronc d’arbre jaune Le Corbusier has dissolved and moved this essential silhouette, creating the two women from an even more complex combination of flat planes of colour and floating lines. In this way, the pair appear both to emerge and dissolve into the background of the composition, yet paradoxically, they retain a powerful sense of volume.
In depicting the nude on such a monumental scale, Le Corbusier was exploring the same motif as his friend and contemporary, Fernand Léger. The artists had first met in 1920, and soon became close friends, sharing similar concerns in their work. At the same time that Le Corbusier began to introduce the figure into his plastic oeuvre, Léger had begun his large Neo-Classical nudes, having left behind the austere mechanical aesthetic that had defined his immediate post-war work to instead embrace a more natural and organic portrayal of the world. In Le Corbusier’s paintings, the stylised lines and forms – as seen in the tree trunk, branch and leaves in the present work – as well as the unmodulated planes of colours are immediately reminiscent of Léger’s compositions of this same period. Yet, while Léger portrayed his women as static, immobile, statue-like objects, Le Corbusier has invested the two abstracted women with a vivid sense of emotion. The right-hand figure throws her arm and her head back, her mouth agape as if emitting a cry of anguish or pleasure. In this way, the figures in Le Corbusier’s painting exude a sense of abandon and dynamism, their expressive gestures seemingly charged with a strangely surreal, frenzied emotion that fills the rest of this enigmatic, multi-dimensional scene.