Past Exhibitions
Le Corbusier: Women and the Sea – Works from the Taisei Collection
Le Corbusier: Women and the Sea – Works from the Taisei Collection
- Dates
- Tuesday 14 July - Sunday 4 October 2015
- Hours
- 9:30 am – 5:30 pm Fridays 9:30 am - 8:00 pm (Admission ends 30 mins. before closing time)
- Closed
- Mondays except 20 July, 10 August and 21 September. Closed on21 July and 24 September.
- Venue
- Prints and Drawings Gallery, NMWA
- Organized by
- The National Museum of Western Art
- With the cooperation of
- TAISEI CORPORATION, Fondation Le Corbusier
- Admission Fees
- Adults 430 yen (220 yen), College students 130 yen (70 yen)
Numbers in parentheses indicate discount fees for groups of 20 or more.
Admission is free for Special Exhibition or Permanent Collection ticket holders.
Visitors aged 18 and under or 65 and older are admitted free of charge. Please show your ID upon entrance to confirm your age.
Disabled visitors admitted free of charge, with one attendant. Please present your disability identification upon arrival.
The year 2015 marks the 50th anniversary of the death of Le Corbusier (1887–1965), the architect of the NMWA’s Main Building. In commemoration, the NMWA presents this small exhibition of paintings, drawings and other media on the themes of women and the sea thanks to the cooperation of the TAISEI CORPORATION, renowned for its important Le Corbusier-related collection.
Le Corbusier first made his name after World War I as a painter and architect dedicated to the principle of Purism with its emphasis on mathematical measurement. But then his paintings underwent a major transformation in the latter half of the 1920s. Le Corbusier often spent the summers on the Atlantic coast of France, and brought the organic forms encountered in that setting, whether rocks, shells or tree roots, into his paintings. Lushly fleshed women became another major theme during this period, a theme that fused with that of the sea as he developed images that were paeans to the rich life force of nature. These works, revealing a focus antithetical to the emphasis of his Purist period, can be seen as containing the seeds of the creative will that would later play out in Le Corbusier’s post-World War II works across the diverse spectrum of architecture, urban planning, paintings and sculpture.
In addition to his paintings and drawings from the late 1920s through the 1950s, this exhibition will also introduce the film Films et photos réalisés par Le Corbusier: années 1930 (Films and photographs by Le Corbusier: the 1930s), produced by the Le Corbusier Foundation, Paris.