Quotes
Quotes
Le Corbusier
‘This boy can see things.'
Berthold Lubetkin
'How can one exercise a value judgement when one is confronted with magic? Yet it is here for us to see.’
[Berthold Lubetkin 1983]
‘Some years ago I was talking with Le Corbusier about Peter Yates with whose work he was familiar, this boy can see things said he, but to me it seemed more relevant that Peter could do things. In his paintings he prodded the depths rather than depicting the surface. Simmering passions behind the stony immobility. Cathedrals like rocks and rocks like cathedrals. From the vision of his beloved Durham locked in the mist of time to the Ultramarine rhapsody of Cyclopic Islands. By staking claims on the distance he excites the imagination. Simplicity, directness and purity give his work the power. That was Peter Yates my friend the poet architect. The song is over but the chords go on vibrating’. [Berthold Lubetkin 1985]
Stephen Gardiner
'Painting, one feels, was for him a somewhat private area of his remarkable imagination, a means of commenting on places visited in his vast travels across England and Europe, or of fixing some very special image that had to be remembered for some future project. For what emerges from this exhibition is an astonishingly clear eye for colour, form and atmosphere; every idea is perfectly observed and executed; a message about a subject is exactly communicated, without blemish. It is, of course, always difficult to say which will have been responsible for what, in their remarkable stream of buildings in Newcastle – whether it was Ryder or Yates – because the imagination in architecture is often a mysterious product of an intricate rapport between minds. All the same, one identifies in them a brilliant graphic sense that one finds here, in these pictures'.
[Stephen Gardiner 1985]
Kenneth Rowntree
‘That he can create the feeling of a whole vernacular architecture by the shrewd choice of a single door or window, or evoke a whole culture by the minimum of artifacts, suggests a happy marriage of his two disciplines’. ‘The economy, the paring away of inessentials, with poetry never very far away, and on occasions a whiff of magic.'
Le Corbusier - A Personal Appreciation, by Peter Yates
Peter Yates, on his first meeting with Le Corbusier at his apartment in Paris (c 1945).
Le Corbusier apologised ..
"See how we are under the Germans".
His dark brown jacket looked completely worn out.
His shoes had thick wooden soles like sabots with uppers of straw basketwork and lined with cat fur.
We sat at the white marble table in the dining room that
Links like the web of an ‘H’ Le Corbusier’s small living room to his large studio.
“Can we see your paintings"? I said
He came out of his chair like an eagle. His eyes shone
"You like painting"?
”are you a painter yourself”?
And round that marvellous room he went, full of excitement, pouring armfuls of drawings onto the low tables.
Drawings of stones and women and flowers and fish and fir cones.
There were thick portfolios labelled "Drawings LC” down through the years. And neat brown paper parcels protecting mounted drawings and labelled “Bulls", “Women”, “Ubu”s
He was back with a vast roll of canvasses that he unrolled, hurling each across the floor, one after another, wrestlers and lovers, stones, bones, giant women with purple fruits and rainbow scarves, great shells perforated by the sea, chestnut leaves unfurling out of sticky buds. Fishes and clouds and rocks and ropes.
He showed how he worked, on writing paper thin enough to trace one drawing from another, retaining some parts, altering others. Using coloured chalk, he then brushed over by water to unify the colour and bring it to the edges of the form.
In all those drawings there was a wildness and accidental life not evident in his monumental and finely coloured oils.
“Would you like one?"
"Choose which you like" he said, shovelling 50 or so onto the table.
I found three nude giantesses, one bright pink, one grey, and one white with bright blue hair, all holding hands and sitting on a rock.
I fell in love with them.
"You like them?" he asked,
Wrote my name in the corner, “Amicalement”
And signed it … Le Corbusier.
