Agenda

The exhibition is dedicated to Le Corbusier’s (1887-1965) handling of colour. He used colour as a spatially formative, iconic element in every phase of his career.

The exhibition retraces the development of his polychromy with photographs, originals, plans, and large-format installations.

These are supplemented by three large-format installations that offer visitors a deeply sensual experience of colour. Polychromy.

Le Corbusier made colour an integral part of his architectural concept and developed what he called “colour keyboards” or claviers de couleurs to match.

Le Corbusier explained the theoretical underpinning of his “Purist”  polychromy in his legendary Zurich lecture of 1938. Colour took on a new significance in his work after World War II.

Henceforth it would serve him as a means of animating large surfaces, becoming, in the broadest sense, an ornament. The architect began using bolder hues in conjunction with untreated materials such as concrete, brick, and wood.

He further broadened the scope of polychromy in architecture by exploring the color of light, whether by means of coloured glass, as in the chapel at Ronchamp (1955), or by projecting coloured light into an interior, as in the Philips Pavilion for Expo 58 in Brussels.

The lower level of the Pavillon retraces the creative use of colour in his oeuvre and the various phases it went through. It starts with his first experiments in La Chaux-de-Fonds and the famous villas of the 1920s and moves on to the large developments of later years such as the Unité d’habitation in Marseille.

Bruce Conner (1933-2008) is legendary for his view of the art world and his reputation as the father of the video clip. He worked in a wide range of media. This exhibition focuses on nine of his experimental films, among these a Movie, Report, Mea Culpa, Crossroads, Monologo and  Looking for Mushrooms are on show.

Stefan Zweig (1881 – 1942) was a successful author a collector of literary manuscripts.

He managed to amass an eclectic range of texts that reflect his keen interest in the diversity of European literature, a collection of several hundred autograph texts by the authors he most admired.

This trove includes rough drafts of famous or unpublished works, preparatory notes, personal letters, even manuscripts meant for the printers, from Renaissance writers up to his contemporaries.

Forced into exile in 1934, Zweig chose to part with his collection and turned to the Viennese bookseller Heinrich Hinterberger, with whom he organized the sale of the manuscripts from London.

The greater part of the collection was acquired by the Swiss bibliophile Martin Bodmer (1899 – 1971) The characteristic unity of the Zweig collection was thus largely preserved.

The exhibition (De Stefan Zweig à Martin Bodmer)  offers the opportunity to see some of the finest pages of the world’s literary heritage.