With a versatile career in architecture, art, and design spanning over five decades, Le Corbusier is regarded as a key figure in the creative facets of 20th century modernism. Born Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris, Le Corbusier began to paint shortly after moving to Paris in 1917 where he met contemporaries Amédée Ozenfant, Pablo Picasso, and Fernand Léger. Together, Le Corbusier and Ozenfant developed a movement called ‘Purism’ which was promoted in their self-published magazine L’Esprit Nouveau. Departing from Cubism, the movement was largely based on still-lifes and investigated color and construction. «The great richness of Le Corbusier’s pictorial work resides in the diversity that it takes on over the ages. It is born from the alchemy that the architect creates between a constantly reworked theme…Like all artists from his time, Le Corbusier benefited from an exceptional knowledge of classical culture, not only artistic but also mathematical, spiritual, and symbolic. Major exhibitions from recent years that show his paintings have enabled us to discover that beyond the occasional but undeniable influences from the great figures of the century whom he encountered such as Picasso, Léger, Matisse, or Miró, Le Corbusier is a cerebral painter, sometimes abstruse but always brilliant, who produced a very demanding and extremely coherent, yet nevertheless a completely personal work.» – Eric Mouchet, Expert on Le Corbusier