Le Corbusier was a jack of all trades and also an opportunist

He was everything at once: architect, designer, artist and writer. And one of the most important driving forces behind modern architecture in Switzerland. Le Corbusier had an incredible output. The art workaholic left behind a body of work that was superlative. Not only in terms of quality and quantity, but also in terms of its sheer diversity.

Le Corbusier built over seventy buildings all over the world, seventeen of which are now UNESCO World Heritage sites. The architectural projects that he was never able to realize number in the hundreds. His legacy includes around forty thousand plans and architectural drawings. In addition, there are around four hundred and fifty paintings, forty sculptures and countless prints, collages and drawings. He also wrote forty books and hundreds of newspaper articles.

Le Corbusier was a multi-talented artist. He was by no means a trained architect. Rather, the all-round artist, born in 1887 in La Chaux-de-Fonds under the name Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, was trained as a decorator of watch cases. He had an artistic rather than a technical understanding of architecture. He also had a very experimental and sometimes idealistic view of what architecture can be at the interface with art. Many of his buildings could be described as walk-in spatial sculptures - think of the Chapel of Ronchamp, for example.

For Le Corbusier, art itself was above all an experimental laboratory: a place of retreat where he could freely compose with form and color. His creative approach to architecture is particularly evident in his architecturally constructed sculptures. He always knew how to completely reinvent it. This ability for creative agility goes hand in hand with an uncompromising desire for artistic freedom. Le Corbusier set and raised themes of modernity like hardly any other artist or architect of his time.

This includes a radical break with tradition as well as the desire to free art from the corset of the academy. He traced architecture back to its prototypical beginnings in antiquity. In addition, Le Corbusier always used non-Western art and cultures as a source of inspiration.

Above all, there is the desire to reduce to the essential. This vision was inspired on the one hand by the then new art form of abstraction, but on the other hand by the search for a new consciousness and attitude to life - an "esprit nouveau", as Le Corbusier himself put it.

The new spirit was directed primarily against ornamentation and academic thinking, as it had been taught to Le Corbusier at the École d'Art in La Chaux-de-Fonds. The decorator of clock cases turned against decoration. But he took something essential with him from the craft he had learned: he made the clock case, and with it the abstract concepts of time and space, his order of things.

These are the two parameters with which, in Le Corbusier's thinking, man creates, explores and structures the world. In his imagination, the order of time and space is also a fundamental artistic and architectural principle. He is convinced that man uses art, including architecture, to counteract the chaotic cosmos. It is only through culture that he makes the world habitable.

With this view, Le Corbusier became part of the avant-garde of his time. After the First World War, they were inspired by the desire to rebuild the world from scratch and, above all, to build it better. Le Corbusier was active in an era of great upheaval, political upheaval, social upheaval, economic instability and belief in technological progress, but also utopias. As an avant-gardist, he found himself in the best company of important artists, not least of whom was Paul Klee. The museum dedicated to him in Bern is now holding a comprehensive exhibition dedicated to Le Corbusier.

The Paul Klee Centre makes it clear that Le Corbusier was driven by the idea of ​​creating a synthesis of all the arts. The exhibition uses his multifaceted work to show how he transcended the boundaries of the genres of art, architecture and design to create a total work of art.

But above all, it also becomes clear how much we only ever see Le Corbusier in fragments: as the architect of buildings such as those found in Zurich or La Chaux-de-Fonds, or as the creator of iconic purist paintings such as those hanging in Swiss museums. For the first time in around forty years in Switzerland, the Zentrum Paul Klee is now showing the entire Le Corbusier. Le Corbusier, who was controversial due to his sympathies for fascism, is not forgotten either.

In recent decades, Le Corbusier and his work have repeatedly come under criticism. The focus of the debate was his ideological stance on fascism, his behavior towards the Vichy regime in France during the Second World War, and his anti-Semitic statements. Le Corbusier's urban planning is still controversial today. The exhibition presents the latest research on this in a transparent manner.

Le Corbusier knew how to engage with radical positions. In the name of progress, he was scathingly critical of established architects and art academies. As a well-known representative of modern architecture, he himself was targeted by the extreme right as well as by representatives of tradition and national identity. The international style was considered "Bolshevik" or "Jewish". This attitude was adopted by National Socialism and later by Italian Fascism.

In the 1920s, Le Corbusier occasionally addressed anti-Semitic stereotypes and resentments in private letters. However, he never made any anti-Semitic statements in public and did not contribute to the racist propaganda of the time.

In order to obtain commissions, Le Corbusier cultivated opportunistic attitudes towards totalitarian ideologies. For example, he worked in the Soviet Union during Stalin's time and at the same time sought contact with Mussolini, who was a promoter of modern architecture until the 1930s. However, Le Corbusier was fundamentally non-conformist and always remained true to his artistic, architectural and urban planning convictions.

The show focuses on Le Corbusier as an artist and Le Corbusier as an architect and shows the great overlap between the two genres in his work: drawing and design and research. When you look at his drawings and designs, you can look over Le Corbusier's shoulder as he experiments. But you also get a glimpse of his diverse sources of inspiration when you look at his extensive collections of postcards from all over the world or of stones and other "objects trouvés".

For example, you can discover the travel drawings of the young Charles-Édouard Jeanneret. They illustrate the passion with which the autodidact, who adopted the pseudonym Le Corbusier from 1920 onwards, dealt with Western cultural history in the form of architectural cityscapes on his travels through Europe as a draftsman and watercolorist.

A surprise are the sculptures presented, which Le Corbusier created in collaboration with the artist Joseph Savina. During the Second World War, due to a lack of commissions, Le Corbusier not only wrote numerous books, but also drew fascinating sculptural designs, which were then translated into around forty wooden sculptures from 1945 onwards.

The lecture drawings will also be a discovery for many. Le Corbusier was a passionate communicator of his ideas and was constantly on the move in airplanes, ocean liners and even by zeppelin to appear before hundreds, even thousands of people around the world. The drawings he created were so popular with the public that they were literally snatched out of Le Corbusier's hands after his lectures.

His designs for the colourful tapestries intended for the interior design of the rooms in Chandigarh, India, are also spectacular. They are part of a planned city in which he turned the idea of ​​a complex synthesis of architecture, art, design and urban planning into reality.

Last but not least, the collages from his late work reveal a little-known, wild side of his artistic work. In these works, Le Corbusier finally freed himself from all rules. Extremely gestural and intuitive images of captivating spontaneity emerged.

"Le Corbusier – The Order of Things", Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, until June 22nd. Catalog: Fr. 39.–.