In the 1920s, Irish designer Eileen Gray built an exquisite Modernist villa on the south coast of France, an elegant, sensual house that critiqued the ideas of (in)famous architect Le Corbusier. The house was an instant sensation, and Corb, a friend of Gray’s partner, soon visited. He stayed more and more often and became obsessed with the place—or with Gray herself? One day he began to paint in the villa, to paint the villa, covering its white walls with gaudy sexual murals.
He built a cabin for himself next door, another set of cabins behind, and gradually he erased Gray’s name from the place. It was an infamous act of vandalism by a quintessential male monster of art. Gray considered her villa the shell of its occupants: Corb as good as tattooed his paintings right on her skin.
A century later, Claire Dederer asked the excellent question, What do we do with the art of monstrous men? Corb’s art was all over Gray’s villa, yet, horribly, it’s largely what saved the house decades later. She’d fled when he began to coopt it, and after he died, it passed through several owners and began falling apart. Corb’s paintings, though: had to be protected.
So, what to do with the art of this monstrous man? Oh, live with it all over you. What to do with , though: this is what interested me when I decided to write a book. How to turn into art itself this monstrous man and his act? How to understand him? What cocktail of envy, passion, arrogance, and made him do what he did?.