// essays //
Fall 2016
From the Pompidou to the Streets of Paris
The Whitewashing of French Anti-Semitism
Judith Teboul
The figure stands tall and proud, facing the viewer with a directness that precludes timidity. Its left arm is raised resolutely in the air, the muscular contours of its biceps a harsh contrast to the delicacy of the small head over which it hangs. Strong shoulders taper down to a narrow waist that then expands to encompass a firm stance. The body curves and twists in a manner rendering the surreal; a form both human and alien.
Commonly known as the Modulor Man, this figure is the creation of a man who was at once a Romantic humanist and a calculating realist: French artist and architect Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, commonly known as Le Corbusier. Though he is mostly famous for his contributions to the world of modern architecture, Le Corbusier is also recognized for this silhouette, the mascot of his system for re-ordering the universe. Le Corbusier began developing the Modulor in 1943, but did not publish the first volume of his study until 1950. The fundamental "module" of the Modulor is a six-foot man, segmented according the "golden section," a ratio of approximately 1.61. These proportions can be scaled up or down to infinity using a Fibonacci progression. He viewed this figure as a single system that encompassed mathematics, the human body, architecture, and beauty—applying it to much of his work.
The prevailing influence of the Modulor Man in Le Corbusier’s work forms the cornerstone of an art exhibition that was on display last year at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, entitled “Le Corbusier: Mesures de l’homme” (human measurements). The show attempts to portray the entirety of Le Corbusier’s artistic identity and creations, and exhibits over 300 of his works, including paintings, architectural plans, sculptures, and writings. As reflected in the title of the exhibition, the influence of the human body—in geometrical, sensorial, and spiritual terms—is pervasive throughout, from furniture and sculpture to architectural plans.
The exhibition also finds fascination with the person of Le Corbusier himself. Vignettes about the artist’s life and various projects interlace the display, creating a cohesive narrative that links the pieces together. Initially, the vignettes appear to offer a view of the man in his entirety. And yet, they remain mere temptations. The vignettes consistently side-step an exploratory dive into Le Corbusier’s personality and instead stay within the bounds of art and the architecture. What is first perceived of as a unifying thread can actually be viewed as a restrictive shackle, preventing passage into other crucial areas of his personality.
Le Corbusier did not live in a vacuum; he was a product of his time and place, subject to the influence of outside events and strains of thought. An examination of his oeuvre without an accompanying study of its context is mere speculation. Therefore, the exhibition’s complete omission of Le Corbusier’s political, religious, and social ideals is not merely in poor taste, but is an incomplete representation of his artistic production.
The exhibition fails to reflect the artist’s anti-Semitic and fascist leanings, which he pronounced publicly throughout his career. During the 1920s, Le Corbusier associated himself with Le Faisceau, a short-lived fascist party with sympathies for Mussolini, and later with the Parti Fasciste Révolutionnaire. In the 1930s, he wrote and published multiple pieces in support of Nazi anti-Semitism in the architectural journals that he founded, Plans and Prélude.
Le Corbusier had a close relationship with Mussolini and was deeply enchanted with Hitler, though the two never met. In 1934, Mussolini invited him to Rome to deliver a prestigious lecture, and in that same year, Le Corbusier intended to meet the Italian dictator again in order to secure the commission of designing Pontinia, a new town built on drained marshland. Two years later, the architect wrote to Mussolini offering his vision for a future planned city in Ethiopia. His letters to his mother from the period show that he maintained a deep admiration of Hitler: “Hitler can crown his life with a great work: the planned layout of Europe,” he wrote in October 1940.
With such close ties to fascism, it is unsurprising that Le Corbusier was hostile towards Jews. In 1910, he wrote to a friend to discuss installing separate “smoking rooms for fat Jews” in one of his buildings. During the Jewish refugee crisis of the 1930s, Le Corbusier stated that he feared that “the trouble would spread to all of Europe,” and called for resettling the Jews outside of Europe and returning them to a state of “nature.” In August of 1940, while corresponding with his mother, Le Corbusier penned, “money, Jews (partly responsible), Freemasonry, all will feel just law.” Further, Le Corbusier wrote that 1943, a year of mass deportation of French Jews to Nazi extermination camps in Germany and Poland, was “a year in which nothing special happened.”
And yet, “Le Corbusier: Mesures de l’homme” does not disclose any of this information. And when a central tenet of the exhibition is that Le Corbusier’s Modulor Man is a rendering of the perfect human form, an ideal against which all people must measure up, sounds a lot like Nazi racial theory, it is a glaring and important concomitance to simply ignore. This connection is strengthened when one considers that Le Corbusier began constructing the Modulor in 1943, at the height of Nazi prominence. It is difficult to imagine that Le Corbusier—someone deeply invested in Nazism and Italian fascism—was not influenced by the Nazi idealization of the human body when constructing this model.
Given the centrality of the Modular Man to the organization of this exhibition, the Museum’s failure to even acknowledge this connection is incredibly problematic, but not at all surprising. The Pompidou’s whitewashing of Le Corbusier’s anti-Semitism is symptomatic of a pervasive issue in modern-day France.
I spent the first half of my life in a heavily Jewish neighborhood in Paris. At the age of seven, I overheard my mom reacting to her friend’s despondency over the state of her teenage son, who was beaten up on the way home from school for exposing his Star of David pendant. At the age of eight, I would look at my father every few minutes while walking in the mall to make sure that his cap completely hid his kippah. I inadvertently turned into a paranoid child who cared as much about her Jewish identity as she did about hiding it. At the age of nine, I heard that we were leaving the country. I was ecstatic, but not because I thought about escaping anti-Semitism, which was the primary motive behind our emigration. I was excited because my parents spoke of the United States just as they would read me fairy-tale stories at night. They were trying to convince me—but, mostly, themselves--that moving across the world was worth it. According to their stories, the move would not be scary, heartbreaking, or too expensive—all promises that turned out to be false.
As I adapted to my new life in America, I inevitably began to compare it to my former life in France. I feel safe in America—free to expose my Jewish star if I wish to do so. Though anti-Semitism seems to be increasing worldwide (even here in America), nowhere has tragedy struck more in an unbelievably short amount of time than the place I once called home.
In the 10 years since I left France, anti-Semitism has surged dramatically. In 2010 alone, nearly 30 tombstones in Strasbourg and a synagogue in Melun were defaced with swastikas and other anti-Semitic graffiti. Violence escalated in 2012 with the murder of a rabbi and three children at a Jewish school in Toulouse. Two years later, a Jewish couple was kidnapped in Creteil, and the woman was raped while their home was robbed. These are only a small sampling of the dozens of horrific incidents that have taken place. Correspondingly, the number of French Jews moving to Israel has doubled—and doubled again—in the past five years. According to the Jewish Agency, nearly 8,000 French Jews moved to Israel in 2015. In 2013, less than 3,300 French Jews moved to Israel, and only two years earlier, that number stood at 1,900.
Awareness of these anti-Semitic acts has not matched the rate of their expansion. One telling example of this occurred in the early 2015. After the devastating terror attack at the headquarters of Charlie Hebdo, the French satirical newspaper, my American high school classmates changed their profile pictures to graphics saying “Je suis Charlie,” standing in solidarity with those affected by the incursion. Few of these classmates, however, were aware that a day later, four people were murdered and four others critically wounded inside a kosher supermarket in Paris. Were the latter events not notable enough to be brought to our attention? The ignorance of my American classmates about this tragedy is correlated with the ignorance of the French public. My Snapchat account was filled with stories of French teens—my old friends—rallying against terrorism, specifically in light of the events at Charlie Hebdo. I found no evidence, however, of commemoration for those killed in the supermarket attack in a significant way. Perhaps this is a product of desensitization: the more frequent anti-Semitic acts become, the less the public reacts to them.
This is not to say that the French government has completely abandoned its Jewish residents. Prime Minister Manuel Valls is an ardent supporter of French Jews, and has recently made several public statements in solidarity with them. He has said unequivocally that France is “not France” without its Jewish community, and has denounced anti-Semitic violence as threatening to the principles of the French Republic.
Unfortunately, however, politicians like Valls are the exception to the rule. Marine Le Pen, potential president-elect of the far right, leads the National Front, a party that is predicated on xenophobia and hyper-nationalist values. When asked about French Jewish organizations, Le Pen articulated that “[these organizations] do not want to see the real danger, they only attack us, and that’s out of political calculation.” She added that “they defend their own private interest.” This far-right politician does not choose to display sympathy for the Jews—quite the contrary. On the other side of the political spectrum is Francois Hollande, current President of France. While Hollande did acknowledge the rise of anti-Semitism following the vandalizing of a Jewish cemetery in Sarre-Union in 2015, he also supported the UNESCO resolution denying Jewish ties to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. In essence, he condemned one act of anti-Semitism, but supported another in the international arena.
I highly doubt that when confronted with the evidence, the curators of the exhibition at the Pompidou would deny that Le Corbusier was an anti-Semite. They would just say that this should have no bearing on how we evaluate his art—a pretty common methodological stance in the art world. However, given the rise of anti-Semitism in modern-day France, the curators’ decision to omit his anti-Semitic and fascist leanings is especially troubling.
When anti-Semitism is constantly left out of the national conversation, it only gets worse. Governed by the ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity, the French find difficulty admitting their socio-political shortcomings, especially when offenses to people’s individual liberties do not affect the general public in an obvious way. At this particular moment of French history, when politicians like Valls are in the minority, an anti-Semitic far-right has come to power, and anti-Semitism in France is at the highest it has been in decades, the country cannot afford to whitewash this aspect of its history, even in its art museums.
Commonly known as the Modulor Man, this figure is the creation of a man who was at once a Romantic humanist and a calculating realist: French artist and architect Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, commonly known as Le Corbusier. Though he is mostly famous for his contributions to the world of modern architecture, Le Corbusier is also recognized for this silhouette, the mascot of his system for re-ordering the universe. Le Corbusier began developing the Modulor in 1943, but did not publish the first volume of his study until 1950. The fundamental "module" of the Modulor is a six-foot man, segmented according the "golden section," a ratio of approximately 1.61. These proportions can be scaled up or down to infinity using a Fibonacci progression. He viewed this figure as a single system that encompassed mathematics, the human body, architecture, and beauty—applying it to much of his work.
The prevailing influence of the Modulor Man in Le Corbusier’s work forms the cornerstone of an art exhibition that was on display last year at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, entitled “Le Corbusier: Mesures de l’homme” (human measurements). The show attempts to portray the entirety of Le Corbusier’s artistic identity and creations, and exhibits over 300 of his works, including paintings, architectural plans, sculptures, and writings. As reflected in the title of the exhibition, the influence of the human body—in geometrical, sensorial, and spiritual terms—is pervasive throughout, from furniture and sculpture to architectural plans.
The exhibition also finds fascination with the person of Le Corbusier himself. Vignettes about the artist’s life and various projects interlace the display, creating a cohesive narrative that links the pieces together. Initially, the vignettes appear to offer a view of the man in his entirety. And yet, they remain mere temptations. The vignettes consistently side-step an exploratory dive into Le Corbusier’s personality and instead stay within the bounds of art and the architecture. What is first perceived of as a unifying thread can actually be viewed as a restrictive shackle, preventing passage into other crucial areas of his personality.
Le Corbusier did not live in a vacuum; he was a product of his time and place, subject to the influence of outside events and strains of thought. An examination of his oeuvre without an accompanying study of its context is mere speculation. Therefore, the exhibition’s complete omission of Le Corbusier’s political, religious, and social ideals is not merely in poor taste, but is an incomplete representation of his artistic production.
The exhibition fails to reflect the artist’s anti-Semitic and fascist leanings, which he pronounced publicly throughout his career. During the 1920s, Le Corbusier associated himself with Le Faisceau, a short-lived fascist party with sympathies for Mussolini, and later with the Parti Fasciste Révolutionnaire. In the 1930s, he wrote and published multiple pieces in support of Nazi anti-Semitism in the architectural journals that he founded, Plans and Prélude.
Le Corbusier had a close relationship with Mussolini and was deeply enchanted with Hitler, though the two never met. In 1934, Mussolini invited him to Rome to deliver a prestigious lecture, and in that same year, Le Corbusier intended to meet the Italian dictator again in order to secure the commission of designing Pontinia, a new town built on drained marshland. Two years later, the architect wrote to Mussolini offering his vision for a future planned city in Ethiopia. His letters to his mother from the period show that he maintained a deep admiration of Hitler: “Hitler can crown his life with a great work: the planned layout of Europe,” he wrote in October 1940.
With such close ties to fascism, it is unsurprising that Le Corbusier was hostile towards Jews. In 1910, he wrote to a friend to discuss installing separate “smoking rooms for fat Jews” in one of his buildings. During the Jewish refugee crisis of the 1930s, Le Corbusier stated that he feared that “the trouble would spread to all of Europe,” and called for resettling the Jews outside of Europe and returning them to a state of “nature.” In August of 1940, while corresponding with his mother, Le Corbusier penned, “money, Jews (partly responsible), Freemasonry, all will feel just law.” Further, Le Corbusier wrote that 1943, a year of mass deportation of French Jews to Nazi extermination camps in Germany and Poland, was “a year in which nothing special happened.”
And yet, “Le Corbusier: Mesures de l’homme” does not disclose any of this information. And when a central tenet of the exhibition is that Le Corbusier’s Modulor Man is a rendering of the perfect human form, an ideal against which all people must measure up, sounds a lot like Nazi racial theory, it is a glaring and important concomitance to simply ignore. This connection is strengthened when one considers that Le Corbusier began constructing the Modulor in 1943, at the height of Nazi prominence. It is difficult to imagine that Le Corbusier—someone deeply invested in Nazism and Italian fascism—was not influenced by the Nazi idealization of the human body when constructing this model.
Given the centrality of the Modular Man to the organization of this exhibition, the Museum’s failure to even acknowledge this connection is incredibly problematic, but not at all surprising. The Pompidou’s whitewashing of Le Corbusier’s anti-Semitism is symptomatic of a pervasive issue in modern-day France.
I spent the first half of my life in a heavily Jewish neighborhood in Paris. At the age of seven, I overheard my mom reacting to her friend’s despondency over the state of her teenage son, who was beaten up on the way home from school for exposing his Star of David pendant. At the age of eight, I would look at my father every few minutes while walking in the mall to make sure that his cap completely hid his kippah. I inadvertently turned into a paranoid child who cared as much about her Jewish identity as she did about hiding it. At the age of nine, I heard that we were leaving the country. I was ecstatic, but not because I thought about escaping anti-Semitism, which was the primary motive behind our emigration. I was excited because my parents spoke of the United States just as they would read me fairy-tale stories at night. They were trying to convince me—but, mostly, themselves--that moving across the world was worth it. According to their stories, the move would not be scary, heartbreaking, or too expensive—all promises that turned out to be false.
As I adapted to my new life in America, I inevitably began to compare it to my former life in France. I feel safe in America—free to expose my Jewish star if I wish to do so. Though anti-Semitism seems to be increasing worldwide (even here in America), nowhere has tragedy struck more in an unbelievably short amount of time than the place I once called home.
In the 10 years since I left France, anti-Semitism has surged dramatically. In 2010 alone, nearly 30 tombstones in Strasbourg and a synagogue in Melun were defaced with swastikas and other anti-Semitic graffiti. Violence escalated in 2012 with the murder of a rabbi and three children at a Jewish school in Toulouse. Two years later, a Jewish couple was kidnapped in Creteil, and the woman was raped while their home was robbed. These are only a small sampling of the dozens of horrific incidents that have taken place. Correspondingly, the number of French Jews moving to Israel has doubled—and doubled again—in the past five years. According to the Jewish Agency, nearly 8,000 French Jews moved to Israel in 2015. In 2013, less than 3,300 French Jews moved to Israel, and only two years earlier, that number stood at 1,900.
Awareness of these anti-Semitic acts has not matched the rate of their expansion. One telling example of this occurred in the early 2015. After the devastating terror attack at the headquarters of Charlie Hebdo, the French satirical newspaper, my American high school classmates changed their profile pictures to graphics saying “Je suis Charlie,” standing in solidarity with those affected by the incursion. Few of these classmates, however, were aware that a day later, four people were murdered and four others critically wounded inside a kosher supermarket in Paris. Were the latter events not notable enough to be brought to our attention? The ignorance of my American classmates about this tragedy is correlated with the ignorance of the French public. My Snapchat account was filled with stories of French teens—my old friends—rallying against terrorism, specifically in light of the events at Charlie Hebdo. I found no evidence, however, of commemoration for those killed in the supermarket attack in a significant way. Perhaps this is a product of desensitization: the more frequent anti-Semitic acts become, the less the public reacts to them.
This is not to say that the French government has completely abandoned its Jewish residents. Prime Minister Manuel Valls is an ardent supporter of French Jews, and has recently made several public statements in solidarity with them. He has said unequivocally that France is “not France” without its Jewish community, and has denounced anti-Semitic violence as threatening to the principles of the French Republic.
Unfortunately, however, politicians like Valls are the exception to the rule. Marine Le Pen, potential president-elect of the far right, leads the National Front, a party that is predicated on xenophobia and hyper-nationalist values. When asked about French Jewish organizations, Le Pen articulated that “[these organizations] do not want to see the real danger, they only attack us, and that’s out of political calculation.” She added that “they defend their own private interest.” This far-right politician does not choose to display sympathy for the Jews—quite the contrary. On the other side of the political spectrum is Francois Hollande, current President of France. While Hollande did acknowledge the rise of anti-Semitism following the vandalizing of a Jewish cemetery in Sarre-Union in 2015, he also supported the UNESCO resolution denying Jewish ties to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. In essence, he condemned one act of anti-Semitism, but supported another in the international arena.
I highly doubt that when confronted with the evidence, the curators of the exhibition at the Pompidou would deny that Le Corbusier was an anti-Semite. They would just say that this should have no bearing on how we evaluate his art—a pretty common methodological stance in the art world. However, given the rise of anti-Semitism in modern-day France, the curators’ decision to omit his anti-Semitic and fascist leanings is especially troubling.
When anti-Semitism is constantly left out of the national conversation, it only gets worse. Governed by the ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity, the French find difficulty admitting their socio-political shortcomings, especially when offenses to people’s individual liberties do not affect the general public in an obvious way. At this particular moment of French history, when politicians like Valls are in the minority, an anti-Semitic far-right has come to power, and anti-Semitism in France is at the highest it has been in decades, the country cannot afford to whitewash this aspect of its history, even in its art museums.
// JUDITH TEBOUL is a freshman in Columbia College. She can be reached at jt2939@columbia.edu. Photo courtesy of FLC, ADAGP, Paris.