Corbusier, Loosened Up

Since you’re reading NYRA I don’t have to tell you who Corb is. Pilotis, horizontal windows, open plan, etc., etc., but did you know he made tapestries, too? Six of them plus studies were on view at Almine Rech’s New York gallery this fall in a pristine exhibition curated by the eminent architectural historian Jean-Louis Cohen. (Conveniently his office is just a block to the east, at NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts.) When Corb was a Purist he made paintings of bottles and guitars that prized symmetry but lined up in strange and uncanny ways. His objects offered arch object lessons on how to live. World War I had come, destroyed, and gone, and Corb, alongside the painter-theorist Ozenfant, wanted to reorder the world as well as the subjects inhabiting it. As he got older he loosened up. (This doesn’t happen to everyone.) While he stuck with still lifes his subject matter swerved. By 1960 bodies curved around bottles, figure and ground flitting back and forth. The exhibition was titled Nomadic Murals, but the works represent more than mere waystations between easel and wa…