Accession Code: wu0131 Title: Totem Date completed: 1963 Medium: Prints Material: Colour Lithograph Height (mm): 730 Width (mm): 804 Depth (mm): n/a Inscription: Signed, monogrammed and dated within the plate: L C 18/10/6 5563 Location Name: Life Sciences, Gibbet Hill Location Description: C Block Location Floor: 1

Swiss born artist Charles Edouard Jeanneret began his career in the graphic arts but was to become known as the revolutionary modernist architect, Le Corbusier. Having trained as an engraver, Le Corbusier settled in Paris in 1918. That same year he met the painter Amedee Ozenfant and their friendship led to the movement known as Purism. They believed that Cubism had descended into meaningless decoration and attempted through Purism to create more significant form. This visually reductive process was also influenced by the form and motion of the new machine age. These images produced forty years later retain much of the Purist ideal. Broad areas of uniform, continuous colour act to unify the image which is built from hard, deliberate outlines in either black or white. This flatness, however is occasionally broken by the inclusion of more organic lines. Here mechanical precision moves towards more biomorphic forms, a concession which is visible in Le Corbusier's later architectural work.