“There are no sculptors only, no painters only, no architects only; the plastic incident fulfills itself in an overall form in the service of poetry.”

—Le Corbusier

Held in the same European private family collection since it was acquired directly from the artist, Nature morte à la bouteille et au violon, 1943 is being publicly exhibited for the first time since its creation. Best known for his revolutionary architectural work, Le Corbusier considered painting a vital component of his aesthetic philosophy, writing, “I think that if any meaning is attributed to my work as an architect, it is to this secret labor that one must attribute its deeper value.”ⁱ Created during the turbulence of the Second World War, this striking still life reflects the maturation of Le Corbusier’s pictorial vocabulary in the post-Purist era, drawing from a motif—violin and violin case—that first appeared in his paintings of the late 1920s.

Le Corbusier, born Charles-Édouard Jeanneret in La Chaux-de-Founds in Switzerland, is best known, perhaps, as the architect, theorist, and urban planner who pioneered the radical mode of modernist architecture known as “The International Style,” with his designs serving as landmarks of the Modern movement. Le Corbusier started his artistic training engraving and enameling watches at the École des Arts Décoratifs at La Chaux-de-Fonds. It was here that Le Corbusier first met Charles L’Eplattenier, who would take the young artist under his wing, tutoring him in art history and draftsmanship. Although it was in these early years that Le Corbusier first began to develop the groundbreaking architectural theories that would go on to redefine the concept of living in the modern world, he was also deeply involved in the contemporary debates surrounding the different stylistic approaches taken in the visual arts at the time. In the early years of the 1910s, Cubism had radically redefined the terms on which observable reality might be represented, combining multiple perspectives into a single picture plane and fragmenting form into fractured, interlocking planes. Like many artists of his time, Le Corbusier was deeply influenced by these revolutionary new modes of representing objects in space, although he was resistant to the more extreme shattering of form that especially categorized the mode of Analytical Cubism developed by George Braque and Pablo Picasso at the movement’s outset. 

“Contour and profile are the touchstone of the architect… Contour and profile are a pure creation of the mind; they call for the plastic artist”

—Le Corbusier

It was when Le Corbusier met like-minded artist and writer Amédée Ozenfant, that the artist was able to cultivate his theories of Cubism and visual analysis into the manifesto of the Purism movement. By 1918, Le Corbusier and Ozenfant had organized their principles into the publication Après le Cubisme, which anticipated larger changes in taste resulting from the interwar years and culminated with newly classical modes of painting. The two believed that Cubism had become corrupted and decided to move away from the founding principles of objective flatness, and abstracted forms. Their collaborative movement emphasized pure, volumetric forms explored primarily through still life arrangements, the objects simplified of any unnecessary detail to clarify the spatial relationships established in these compositions.

By 1927, Ozenfant and Le Corbusier had a bitter falling out, perpetuated by a heated exchange of correspondence between the two artists. In the period of “mourning”—as Le Corbusier himself termed it— which followed, he set out to shape his own individual visual style.ⁱⁱ Freed from the rigidity of the Purist canon, Le Corbusier could now explore the joy of painting. With no limits, Le Corbusier expanded his painting practice to include increased looser forms, brighter colors, and a more diverse array of subject matter. Whereas Purism had emphasized clarity, economy of form, and the mechanical object as the symbol of modern life, Le Corbusier post-Purist works turn inward, becoming more introspective, introducing motifs drawn from memory and myth.

Nature morte à la bouteille et au violon exemplifies Le Corbusier’s departure from strict Purism, embracing a compositional complexity and textural freedom that signals his evolving visual language. While retaining the compartmentalization and structural clarity that would later inform the Modulor system, the painting moves decisively beyond the flat restraint of earlier works. A horizontal violin, rendered in orange-red and grey and striated into sections, floats before its wood-grained case, itself broken into warm ochres and yellows, articulated with the artist’s fine black lines. The violin dominates the composition as its most recognizable form, flanked by bottles at left and center. A blue and orange bottle stretches vertically along the left edge, counterbalanced by a monumental green carafe at right whose five fluted forms suggest both a colonnade and a ribcage—hints at Le Corbusier’s enduring ambition to reconcile the human body with architectural proportion.

"Seek and you shall find. Look into the depths of the work and ask yourself questions. There are illuminations and scenes, hours of substance…And in addition there are the screams of the subconscious, sensual and chaste; everything you can imagine."

—Le Corbusier

The painting introduces a familiar cast of objects—violins, bottles, glasses, and cases—yet renders them with a newly lyrical sense of ambiguity and play. Fragmented details such as reversed numbers, eye-like ovals, and cube-like shapes evoke both symbolic and mathematical associations, alluding to Fibonacci spirals and golden ratios that would preoccupy Le Corbusier in the postwar years. The carafe, rising into a landscape of mint green hills and blue sky, is punctuated with pastel tones—peach, lilac, ochre, and three distinct shades of blue—that fracture the picture plane while unifying the composition chromatically. Near its neck appears a geometric, kaleidoscopic coup or glass, described by the artist as a black calligraphic flourish set against a mosaic of color. Near the lower edge of the painting, a sequence of abstracted dots and a green rectangular form echo the coup at upper right, reinforcing the painting’s visual grammar. Rendered in oil on canvas, the composition achieves a subtle equilibrium in which everyday objects, architectural metaphors, and mathematical rhythms converge in a rigorously ordered yet imaginatively fluid whole.

Painted during a transitional period in Le Corbusier’s artistic development—and amid the broader upheaval of the Second World War—Nature morte à la bouteille et au violon reflects an artist deeply attuned to the material and intellectual conditions of his time. Just as his architecture responded to the needs of modern life through clarity, proportion, and rational design, so too did his painting seek to bring visual order to the world around him. This still life reveals a practice in flux: grounded in the structural logic of Purism yet increasingly open to symbolic allusion, formal experimentation, and expressive freedom. A visionary of modernism across disciplines, Le Corbusier strove to unify art and architecture through a shared vocabulary of proportion, geometry, and harmony—principles that underpin not only his built work, but also his painterly vision.

Collector’s Digest

• Coming to auction for the first time, this work has been held in the same family collection since its acquisition directly from the artist. 


• Painted in 1943, the work belongs to a pivotal moment in Le Corbusier’s interdisciplinary practice, as he was developing the Modulor—a human silhouette conceived that year as the foundation for a proportional system that would underpin his later work and embody his vision of human-scale, humanist architecture.


• Currently the subject of a major monographic exhibition at the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern—and recently the focus of a significant presentation at the Panasonic Shiodome Museum of Art in Tokyo, which remained on view through March 2025—Le Corbusier continues to be recognized as one of the most influential figures of the modernist era.
   

ⁱLe Corbusier, quoted in Naïma Jornod and Jean-Pierre Jornod, Le Corbusier (Charles Edouard Jeanneret). Catalogue raisonné de l'oeuvre peint. Tome I, Milan, 2005, p. 245.
ⁱⁱLe Corbusier, quoted in Naïma Jornod and Jean-Pierre Jornod, Le Corbusier (Charles Edouard Jeanneret). Catalogue raisonné de l'oeuvre peint. Tome II, Milan, 2005, p. 1028.