La Cienega Area

Le Corbusier--the pseudonymous Swiss-born architect famous for his severe, functional buildings--generally came to his office in Paris only after spending the morning at home working on his paintings. In 1918, as a self-taught 31-year-old fresh from a small Alpine town, Charles-Edouard Jeanneret had encountered the painter and designer Amedee Ozenfant, who dazzled him with the geometric harmonies of Purism (a smoothed-out, more readable offshoot of Cubism).

A few years later Ozenfant had suggested a suitably dashing nom de plume for a series of polemical articles on modern architecture. Although Le Corbusier broke with Ozenfant in 1925, his artistic influence was soon replaced by that of painter Fernand Leger, another friend. During his last couple of decades the controversial modernist hero of architecture occasionally incorporated in his art stylistic elements--monstrous profiles, bullet-breasted women--from the equally controversial modernist hero of painting, Picasso.

Works on paper from the 1920s through 1965 (the year of Le Corbusier’s death) are the product of a firm and deliberate touch that came to be absorbed by the minute quiddities of human anatomy. In “Deux Bouteilles et Livre” from 1928--a compact ink sketch on graph paper--he still seems to be grappling for a geometric vocabulary adequate to convey his vision of real-life objects. His own voice comes through much more clearly in an undated ink drawing, “Femme Couchee,” in which the squared hip of the woman, the necklace beads that echo her little round toes, and the pair of elegantly curved lines that describe the book she is reading are reminiscent of Leger but with a distinctive, suavely economical twist.

In several pieces from the ‘50s, some incorporating effortlessly posed scraps of torn colored papers, Le Corbusier lingered on the human hand, tracking--in his robustly stylized way--the way the thumb curves or the shape of a fingernail or the puffiness of the individual pads of flesh on the palm. Perhaps this near-obsession was related to his architectural theory of “Modulor” (formulated in its final version in 1950), by which all his buildings were to incorporate a distinctively human scale. In any case, the work on view is for the most part wonderfully muscular, honest stuff, much more than a footnote to the famously ascetic buildings. (Fiorella Urbinati Gallery, 8818 Melrose Ave., to April 30.)