Étude sur le mouvement d'art decoratif en Allemagne (A Study of the Decorative Arts Movement in Germany)

Abstract

Introduction by Nancy J. Troy Charles-Edouard Jeanneret (better known as Le Corbusier, a pseudonym adopted in connection with his work as an architect) published his first small book, Etude sur le mouvement d’art decoratif en Allemagne (A Study of the Decorative Arts Movement in Germany), in 1912. Researched during the course of an extended stay in Germany between April 1910 and May 1911, the Etude had been commissioned by the Ecole d’Art of his Swiss hometown, La Chaux-deFonds. There, beginning in 1902, Jeanneret had studied decorative art for five years in preparation for a career in the local watch-making industry. Under the tutelage of Charles L’Eplattenier, his teacher and mentor throughout this period, the young man’s horizons, and his ambitions, gradually broadened beyond the study of art and ornament to embrace architecture and eventually urbanism as well. In 1907, Jeanneret embarked on a four-year period of travel that brought him to Italy, Vienna, Paris (where he worked for the architect and building contractor, Auguste Perret), and Germany, culminating in 1911 in his so-called Voyage d’Orient through the Balkans to Istanbul, Greece, and central Italy. During the year spent in Germany, Jeanneret traveled widely but also worked for five months as a draughtsman in the Berlin office of Peter Behrens, the most significant modern architect and industrial designer in Germany at the time. Throughout his stay in Germany, Jeanneret remained in close contact with L’Eplatennier, with whom he was preparing a book, La Construction des Villes, which was never published.1 L’Eplattenier recognized his young protege’s need to support himself while traveling abroad and therefore arranged for the Ecole d’Art to pay Jeanneret to report on the situation of the decorative arts in Germany, covering a wide range of issues that might prove instructive to his Swiss sponsors, from professional education to the fabrication and sale of designs, and offering comments on the beautification of cities and 1 H. Allen Brooks has shown that this project sowed the seeds for the much later and vastly transformed Urbanisme, published in 1925. See H. Allen Brooks, Le Corbusier’s Formative Years: CharlesEdouard Jeanneret at La Chaux-de-Fonds (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1997). I am indebted to Brooks’s extensive original research.