2026.05.12
questions for google/AI, etc.
Q:
What was the relationship between Marcel Duchamp and Le Corbusier?
A:
Marcel Duchamp and Le Corbusier operated within the same, highly influential European avant-garde circles in the early 20th century but maintained a relationship based more on intellectual and conceptual parallel paths than personal collaboration. They both responded to the rise of machine-age technology--Duchamp by selecting industrial objects as "Readymades" and Le Corbusier by adopting them as "tools of the house" in his architecture.
Relationship Highlights and Parallels:
Conceptual Parallels: Both figures questioned the traditional roles of creator and art/architecture. Duchamp used "Readymades" to disrupt art (e.g., Fountain, 1917), while Le Corbusier used industrial objects, such as standard bidets or pipes, treating them as "tools" to be "architecturized" in spaces like the Pavillon de l'Esprit Nouveau in 1925.
Cultural Milieu: They were both active in Parisian intellectual circles during the 1910s and 1920s, heavily influenced by new technology like X-rays, electricity, and automobiles.
Shared "Machine" Aesthetic: While Duchamp viewed the "readymade" as an ironic, anti-aesthetic art form, Le Corbusier viewed it as a functional, purist object. Despite this, both embraced the industrial object, with Le Corbusier arguably "authorizing" the readymade within the space of architecture.
Theorized Connection: Some, like researcher Philippe Duboy, have proposed a complex, albeit often doubted, theory that Duchamp modified drawings by Jean-Jacques Lequeu in a "vendetta" against Le Corbusier, a claim viewed as largely speculative.
Ultimately, the relationship is one of two key figures independently addressing the same crisis of industrialization in art and architecture through the lense of found objects.
Q:
Did you know that Marcel Duchamp and Le Corbusier had dinner [together] 12 May 1947 at Monte's Restaurant in New York City?
A:
That is an incredibly specific and fascinating detail about two giants of modernism! While a search of the provided documents does not specifically confirm a 12 May 1947 dinner at Monte's Restaurant on MacDougal Street, it is highly plausible given their social circles in New York at the time.
Here is what is known about that context:
Le Corbusier in NYC: In 1947, Le Corbusier was actively working as one of the architects designing the United Nations Headquarters in New York, a massive project that kept him in the city, making a dinner meeting with fellow artists very likely.
Duchamp's Circle: Marcel Duchamp was a staple of the New York art scene, and often met with other European intellectuals and artists during this period.
Monte's Restaurant: This Greenwich Village spot was a known haunt for artists, writers, and celebrities during the 1940s and 1950s, often featuring hand-written menus due to its fresh, daily-changing food.
It sounds like a wonderful anecdote about two artists often considered to be "modernist" opposites--one promoting strict, functional order and the other anti-art and chance--sharing a meal.
While again reading the "Demolishing an Architect: Le Corbusier" chapter of Duboy's Lequeu: An Architectural Enigma last night, I was reminded of "a fiction all but for the fourth dimension".
2025.05.12
on Instagram
 
remembering a special Philadelphia Saturday afternoon, almost a quarter century ago
451 Rhawn Gallery
 
...just one of the "deaccessioning" gifts received today from the Medical Mission Sisters.
2020.05.12
Mary Boone's 180 hours of community service hours 73 74 75 76 77 78
2008.05.12
Palace 2.0 Mixes History, Consumerism
Is Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye still a real house, or is it now more like a fake shrine?
2002.05.12
Re: 'game over" design
I got a copy of Homo Ludens a few years ago, and so far I have really only read the introduction. Nonetheless, I still got much from the book so far. For example, I collected many passages that I feel relate to how Piranesi designed/'played with' his reenactment of ancient Rome via the Ichnographia Campus Martius--indeed, reenactment itself is very much a "re-play", literally a playing / acting [even designing?] again.
1947.05.12
1947. Monday, New York City
Maria Martins and Marcel dine with the Kieslers and Le Corbusier at Monte's Restaurant.
Ephemerides
1943.05.12
1943. Wednesday, New York City
Mary Reynolds and Marcel dine with the Kieslers and Howard Putzel.
Ephemerides
1917.05.12
1917. Saturday, New York City
After having dinner at an Italian restaurant, Louise Norton, Aileen Dresser, Roché and Marcel return to 110 West 88th Street.
Ephemerides
1916.05.12
1916. Friday, New York City
Duchamp thanks John Quinn for agreeing to lend Femme assise by Duchamp=Villon to the exhibition in Philadelphia [9.5.1916] and encloses the translations as promised. In the letter from Rouault, Duchamp has had to add some words in parentheses and comments: "Even so, I think you will not quite understand some phrases which have a doubtful sense in French also."
Ephemerides
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