(La Chaux-de-Fonds 1887–1965 Roquebrune-Cap-Martin)
Still Life, 1922, signed and dated Jeanneret 22, watercolour,
pencil and ink on thick paper, 66 x 53 cm, framed

Provenance:
Gift of the artist to James Johnson Sweeney (1900–1986), New York
by descent to his son Sean Sweeney, New York
Mitchell-Innes & Nash Gallery, New York (label on the reverse) –
acquired from the above
European Private Collection

Compare:
Paris, Galerie Denise René, Le Corbusier, December 1971 New York,
February 1972, ill. on the cover

Painting: a mechanical event of psychic mobility in the special form of plastic creation.
Psychics: emerging from the depth of consciousness and exteriorised by a sensitivity
characteristic of nature. The obsession of expressing all emotion in plastic writing, a kind of aggravated malady, or a kind of aggravated state of grace. A painter is chosen. If he does not know this, life will teach him; he will not escape. Little by little his existence is encumbered by the particular need to act through drawing, through form, through colour: he is the
centre of invin-cible reactions: those worries, those perceptions, those acknowledgements, those measures, those choices, those relationships, those groupings, those affirmations
– in other words, those intimate and perfectly indiscreet manifestations – of his self.
Painting – his painting – strips him nude in the street. That is just the way it is!

Texts by the artist. Editions Albert Morance, Paris, 1937

What makes this work especially interesting are its
exceptional provenance and its illustrious history.
Its special value stems mainly from the circumstance that it was a personal gift from Le Corbusier to James Johnson Sweeney. Sweeney (1900–1986) was an influential art critic, historian, exhibition organiser and museum director, who served in prominent posts at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Guggenheim.
Subsequently, this work came into the possession of the renowned Mitchell-Innes & Nash Gallery in New York and then to its current owner.