Discipline and Ridicule: Giorgio de Chirico, Le Corbusier, and the Objects of Architecture in Interwar Paris

摘要

To encompass both Breton and Le Corbusier-that would mean drawing the spirit of contemporary France like a bow, with which knowledge shoots the moment in the heart. -Walter Benjamin Like a bespectacled Tintin gumming a cigarette, Le Corbusier leans-in a sketch by the cartoonist Ted Benoit-on a "First Chair" (1983) by Memphis designer Michele De Lucchi. Unperturbed by the furniture's decorative flourishes, the architect puffs away with all the insouciance of the diminutive train at his side, which goes nowhere atop its lone Doric column. Trabeated versions of Giorgio de Chirico's trademark arcades indicate-along with the scene's spare decor and strange confluence of objects-that we are inside a pastiche of the Italian painter's Metaphysical cityscapes (1910-1919). The conflation of modernity and antiquity staged in de Chirico's images reaches, in the improbable congress of Benoit's parody, a higher mathematics of art-historical overdetermination.