Exhibition 7

In 1921, Le Corbusier first took note of the paintings by André Bauchant at the Paris Salon d’Automne. Shortly thereafter, the architect visits the painter in the Touraine and becomes the first to acquire one of his works. From this encounter emerged a friendship lasting over two decades, marked by intellectual exchange and mutual respect, which finds expression not least in an extensive correspondence. Born in Château-Renault, André Bauchant (1873–1958) leaves school at the age of fourteen, becomes a gardener like his father, and later runs a flourishing tree nursery employing more than a dozen workers. For his business, he regularly travels through central and western France, combining his interest in history with visits to ancient sites and historic monuments. At the outbreak of the First World War, Bauchant—then forty—is drafted and takes part in the Dardanelles Offensive. The settings of Greek mythology, which until then he had known only from books, now appear before his own eyes: “I saw Greece, Olympus, the gods—and Homer was my companion. I lived the dreams of my childhood.” Back in the Touraine, he receives military training in telemetry and impresses his superiors with his drawing skills: with meticulous precision, he sketches topographical maps; his comrades salvage pastel pencils, paint tubes, cardboard, and even canvases from the ruins—in return, he makes portraits of them. After the war ends, he finds his nursery in a state of neglect. He liquidates what remains, buys canvases and paints—and begins to paint. From then on he produces works featuring allegorical, historical, religious, and mythological subjects, infused with memories, literary influences, and daydreams. Another significant aspect of his oeuvre consists of portraits, landscapes, and floral compositions, often framed by depictions of fruits and birds from his daily surroundings. When Bauchant submits paintings to the Paris Autumn Salon in 1921, nine are accepted—whereas normally at most two would be. Thus begins an extraordinary career: international exhibitions in museums and galleries; patrons such as Wilhelm Uhde and the gallery owner Jeanne Bucher; stage design commissions for Sergei Djagilew; an oeuvre of more than 3,000 paintings. Despite his success, Bauchant eschews the Parisian art scene. He remains in the countryside, devoted to his own imagery: “When he is not painting, he devotes eye and hand to his vineyard, his trees, the flowers and vegetables in his garden … He reads. His library is his only luxury. There he accumulates engravings and beautiful, bound volumes … One of his favourite books is Rollin’s Histoire ancienne … On Sundays he rests. He enters the church, always among the first, through the side door.” (Maximilien Gauthier, 1943) Those wishing to see his latest works had to visit him in person. Fourteen years after Bauchant, Le Corbusier is born Charles‑Édouard Jeanneret‑Gris (1887–1965) in La Chaux‑de‑Fonds, a small town in the Jura region of Switzerland renowned for its watchmaking industry. Like his father, he learns the craft of engraving and enamelling watch dials, attends the local school of arts and crafts, and is influenced by the regional Art Nouveau style. During educational journeys through Europe and Asia Minor, he studies buildings and craftsmanship. Back home, he designs his first buildings, applying the architectural knowledge he has acquired. In 1917, he moves to Paris. Initially without major architectural commissions, he turns to painting and joins the artistic avant‑gardes. Together with Amédée Ozenfant and Paul Dermée, he founds the journal L’Esprit nouveau. Revue internationale d’esthétique in 1920, where he formulates ideas about Purism and actively engages in contemporary debates. It is in this journal that the first article about André Bauchant appears; further reviews follow. In this way, Le Corbusier introduces the painter to a broader audience, and also acts as an intermediary for potential buyers. Among these are artists such as Jacques Lipchitz, Jean Lurçat, and Serge Lifar, the designer and architect Charlotte Perriand, and the French art collector Alphonse Kann, originally from Vienna. Numerous photographs from the late 1920s depict the architect in his old‑fashioned, charmingly cluttered apartment on Rue Jacob, captured in moments of leisure—for example, reading a newspaper, smoking a pipe, and wearing slippers. During this period, Le Corbusier also begins to revise his biography, presenting himself as a self‑taught outsider, distant from institutions and fashionable circles, as the “peasant of Paris.” Accordingly, his enthusiasm for the paysan‑poète Bauchant stems less from the painter’s subject matter than from the artistic conviction he attributes to him. For Le Corbusier, Bauchant’s art embodies a creative practice untouched by academic rules and conventions, whose “truthfulness” he contrasts with what he sees as the exhausted cultural norms of his time: “Bauchant, the peasant poet, masters his work in a wonderful manner—precisely because no aesthetic worries trouble him, because he is free of scruples and has that naiveté which allows one to dare everything—with a craftsmanship which one all too often vainly seeks in the artists of the intellectual classes.” (L’Esprit nouveau, 1921) In a letter written in 1949, Le Corbusier interprets Bauchant’s modest lifestyle as an expression of the authenticity he finds lacking in bourgeois art circles: “They lived on a small clearing; they worked in a room illuminated only through the four glass panes of a small glass door …” He had articulated this idea even more explicitly earlier in a lecture at the Volta Congress in Rome in 1936: the “Sunday painters”—amateurs and outsiders, including Bauchant and himself—are the only legitimate carriers of a new art, one emancipated from the taste of elites and the “plastic aristocracy.” The artistic naïveté Le Corbusier projects onto Bauchant is thus not a deficiency, but a source of creative vitality. Hitherto, he develops an aesthetic theory closely linked to anthropological concepts such as Claude Lévi‑Strauss’s pensée sauvage or bricolage. The bricoleur—in Lévi‑Strauss’s terms—does not adhere to a fixed plan, but designs, improvises, and experiments with whatever is available. It is precisely this approach that Le Corbusier identifies as the strength of autodidactic artists such as Bauchant or Louis Soutter, whom he regards as his “kindred spirits.” Unburdened by the “decadent” academic canon, their works, in his view, bear witness to an unmediated vision of the world, unclouded by education, market forces, or tradition. In the 1950s, Charlotte Zander becomes aware of André Bauchant, begins exhibiting his works regularly in her Munich gallery from the 1970s onward, and thus significantly shapes his reception in German‑speaking countries. In 2001, she devoted a major retrospective to him at the Museum Charlotte Zander in Bönnigheim, Germany. Today, her collection includes over 140 paintings and drawings—among them works from Le Corbusier’s collection particulière—making it one of the largest holdings of the artist’s work worldwide. From this rich trove, Regina Barunke, curator of the exhibition, has selected a group of works, complemented by loans from the Fondation Le Corbusier in Paris. A comprehensive catalogue accompanies the exhibition, featuring in‑depth essays and selected archival material. For the first time, it also presents the correspondence between Bauchant and Le Corbusier, transcribed, translated, and arranged in chronological order. Supported by Fondation Le Corbusier, Ministerium für Kultur und Wissenschaft des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen und Kunststiftung NRW