Rich Tapestry

The Australian Financial Review Magazine

February 2016

Le Corbusier’s ‘lost’ tapestry, The Dice Are Cast, has made a circuitous journey
to the Sydney Opera House.

In late October 1958 a Danish architect of great promise, Jørn Utzon, sits at his desk to compose a letter to his hero, Charles-Edouard Jeanneret-Gris, an architect and artist better known by his moniker, Le Corbusier.

It's 20 months since Utzon won an international competition to build an opera house on Sydney's Bennelong Point, construction of which is due to start in three months' time. The design for the building's eye-catching, sculptural roof – sail-like, shell-like, but quite unlike anything – has already been acclaimed a work of genius. The Dane is now turning his famously lateral mind to the interior.

Utzon takes a seat in his study at the modernist-minimalist family home in Hellebaek , built six years earlier in a stretch of forest on the coast of Øresund Sound, north of Copenhagen. He begins in his best French:

Cher Monsieur Le Corbusier,

I have long wanted to write to you to thank you for all that you mean, and have meant, to me and I allow myself to send you my project for the Opera of Sydney … It would be an immense joy if I could be assured of your participation in the decoration, the tapestries and the paintings, of this edifice and I pray to you to let me know if you could make something for it in one form or another.

At the same time I ask if I could obtain permission to buy some of your oil paintings and tapestries ...

Somehow, in the chaos of the following decades, the idea of a Sydney Opera House interior exhibiting Le Corbusier artworks was lost. But not entirely. And not for all time.

In March, almost 60 years after Le Corbusier received Utzon's courtly letter at his Rue de Sevrès atelier in Paris, the Opera House will unveil an artwork produced by the Franco-Swiss modernist at the peak of his fame, for the 39-year-old Danish architect with his bittersweet Sydney triumph all ahead of him. A funky, jazzy, boldly coloured wool tapestry measuring 2.18 metres by 3.55 metres, the work is titled Les Dés Sont Jetés (The Dice Are Cast).

Bought by the Opera House for more than $550,000 at an auction in Denmark last June, a purchase funded almost entirely by private donors, The Dice Are Cast will hang in the Opera House's western foyer. It's a bookend of sorts to another tapestry hanging at the House, this one designed by Utzon himself in the later part of his life.

The Dice Are Cast is much more than a companion piece though. It throws light on the momentary uniting in common purpose of two groundbreaking architects, whose correspondence highlights the extent to which Utzon admired Le Corbusier. It helps illuminate Utzon's early thinking about the interiors of the building that would come to define him, and hints at what might have been had Le Corbusier not drowned off the Cote d'Azur in 1965 and Utzon not been forced off his Australian project a year later. The Dane was not present at the 1973 opening of the Opera House, and never returned to Australia to see it.

But The Dice Are Cast also holds secrets, principal among them whether it was commissioned to eventually hang in the Opera House, was an experimental prototype for the types of tapestries Utzon envisaged hanging there, or was bought simply for joy and artistic inspiration, to hang in the Utzon family home. There are differing views on this – and the two men who could definitively answer the question are no longer around to do so. The tapestry guards its secrets well.

Le Corbusier, or Corbu to his legion of admirers, was an architect, urban theorist and propagandist for the "machine theory" of living. As early as 1923, in his manifesto Toward an Architecture, he declared: "A house is a machine for living in." Two years later he advanced a proposal to level a large swath of central Paris, including the charming Marais, one of the city's last medieval districts, and to erect an army of cruciform towers there. In time his architecture softened, evolving its own kind of lyrical charm. 

Corbu was also an artist of not insignificant ambition – touched with greatness in his own mind – working with oil, gouache, wool and wood, producing paintings, sketches, ceramics and textiles in a derivative style heavily influenced by Picasso, Braque and Leger. He regarded himself as an artist as much as an architect, and would work each morning on his art projects, turning to architectural questions in the afternoon.

In a revealing photograph from 1949, Corbu stands next to his hero, Pablo Picasso, who visited the building site of his ingenious Unite d'Habitation mass housing unit in Marseilles. The architect, who in most photographs is dressed in suit, tie and trademark round black tortoise-shell glasses, has unbuttoned his shirt down to the navel. He wants to be adored by Picasso. The Spaniard, though, was deeply equivocal about Corbusier's art, much to the latter's chagrin.

So Corbu was delighted, almost 10 years later, to find a fan of his art in Utzon, winner of the 1956 international competition to design an opera house on Sydney Harbour. Better still, here was a fan ready, as Utzon's opening letter makes clear, to become a customer.

The Dice Are Cast arrived at the Utzon home in Hellebæk in April 1960 and went straight onto the dining room wall. It remained a feature of the family home, aside from the period in the 1960s during which Utzon, his wife Lis and their three children Jan, Kim and Lin, lived in Sydney. In October 1960, the Utzons wrote to Le Corbusier about the tapestry.

"It is a daily source of delight and beauty, not only for ourselves and our children but for all our friends and guests too. It has endowed our home with a beauty so exquisite that I am at a loss for the proper words to describe our feelings about it."

Subsequent correspondence included a request by Utzon to purchase some of Corbusier's sculptures and enamels, which "keep me in contact, in a curious way, constantly with your work that I have seen in India and France, and forces all my devotion and power for trying to reach the highest quality possible in my work."

In July 1963, Le Corbusier wrote back to Utzon. By this time he had received from Denmark a photograph of the tapestry on the wall behind the dining table. "It seems to me that it is a heresy to position such a tapestry at the end of a niche where it is hidden behind a table and chairs." 

On the day he received the letter Utzon wrote to reassure Corbusier that his paintings and tapestries had been placed in a bank box when the Utzons left for Sydney 18 months earlier. "I hope that it will make you feel better that in future, your artworks will be in the right place. Your art is an important injection in my system and I would be glad if you would give me permission to buy ..."

What emerges from the chain of correspondence between the pair, which is held by the Fondation Le Corbusier in Paris, is Utzon's ardent desire to collect Le Corbusier's artworks. The other salient quality of the exchange is the emotionally one-sided nature of it. Corbu is courteous yet clipped; Utzon has a tendency to flatter and fawn.

Jørn Utzon died in 2008 and the tapestry, along with several other Corbusier artworks, ended up with his eldest son Jan. An architect himself, Jan put some of these pieces up for auction last June. Denmark's Bruun Rasmussen Auctioneers gave the tapestry an upper estimate of 800,000 Danish kroner, equivalent to about $160,000. Le Corbusier's prices had begun to spike in recent years, following surveys of his oeuvre held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Pompidou Centre in Paris. The tapestry was one of an edition of five or six; significantly from a provenance point of view, it was the one that had long hung in the Utzon family home.

In the weeks leading up to the auction, Opera House chief executive Louise Herron talked to potential donors, enthusing them with the tapestry's back story. The first to donate to its purchase was former fashion king Peter Weiss, whose largesse saw him subsequently named lead donor to the tapestry. Other contributors included Joseph Skrzynski, the former Sydney Opera House Trust chairman who re-engaged Utzon with the House in the early 2000s; film producer Rebel Penfold-Russell; film director George Miller; architect Michael Darling; and Penelope Seidler, widow of the architect Harry. 

In the end, the Opera House had to bid up to $415,000 to secure The Dice Are Cast. When the auctioneer's commission and artist royalty were included the price came to just over $552,000. News came through to Herron that they'd been successful at about 3am Sydney time. Too excited to sleep, she sent celebratory texts to friends and donors. "It reminded me of the feeling when my first son was born," she says.

The Opera House issued a statement announcing that it had bought a tapestry designed by Le Corbusier for the House but never installed, which would now "finally take its place as originally proposed". Jan Utzon expressed delight that the tapestry was "finally coming home to the Sydney Opera House, in keeping with our father's original intention". 

The release quoted University of Queensland academic Antony Moulis on some of the tapestry's detail. "The graphical sign positioned in the bottom right of the tapestry – white lines on a black ground appearing to represent a crying face and, simultaneously, the letter 'P' – appears to be produced by tracing over the competition issue site plan of Bennelong Point, while the graphic outline forming the centre of the 'P' is in fact an outline of the distinctive plan footprint of the tram depot previously housed on Bennelong Point."

Upon arriving in Australia, the tapestry was sent to the Sydney workshop of International Conservation Services, which was charged with cleaning and restoring it. 

Julian Bickersteth , managing director of the conservation company, surveys his handiwork as the tapestry lies, in all its vibrant proto-Cubist glory, on a raised workbench. "It's a very beautiful thing," he says. "Of course it doesn't have quite the same impact lying down like this as it will hanging up."

An Oxford-educated conservator, Bickersteth and his team spent months cleaning the tapestry – "there was quite a lot of food splattered about the place" – before air-drying it. It came to them with a "general greyness to the lovely white area," he explains, and a pronounced dulling of the red and the black.

The conservator points out a curiosity: a sharp V-shape, invisible in reproduction, has been woven into the field of white. The small green motif of an oval floating above a set of serrated pylons has suffered most from light exposure, he says. "Light is the biggest threat to a tapestry such as this."

As midwife to the reborn work, Bickersteth knows it almost as well as the weavers, from Aubusson in central France, who created it in either late 1959 or early 1960. The thing he struggles with is its meaning. He has been told that the letter P represents the Bennelong tram site but is unsure of the sinuous figure on the left. "A reference to the performing arts?" he shrugs. "There's a lot of knowledge that we don't have."

A week after my meeting with Bickersteth the Opera House unveils the tapestry at a function for friends and donors. Herron and Weiss pull aside a red curtain for the tapestry's big reveal. It has quite an impact. An engaging speaker, Herron imbues the story with a narrative thrill and emotion.

"The Dice Are Cast is no minor work," Herron tells the gathered crowd, which sips on champagne. "I understand there are six originals of the tapestry. One hung behind Le Corbusier's casket just a few years later. Yet, incredibly, it remained all but unknown in Australia. Before the tapestry could reach its intended destination, Utzon was gone, forever, a story we know all too well. Instead it has hung for more than 50 years in Utzon's dining room in Denmark. The Opera House was literally the backdrop to the Utzon family's meals."

It is here that I meet Moulis, associate professor at the University of Queensland's school of architecture. It is his view that Utzon commissioned the tapestry specifically for the Opera House: in his academic papers he calls it the Sydney Opera House Tapestry. An expert on aspects of Le Corbusier's work, Moulis was researching in the archives of the Fondation Le Corbusier in 2006 when he came across the correspondence between Corbu and Utzon.

In a century of godlike architects, they were two of the defining deities. Yet they were temperamentally very different. Corbu was the propagandist for an entire, quasi-Utopian movement; Utzon is best known for the one expressive work. Moulis was excited to find evidence of their collaboration.

"I gathered the letters up and brought copies of them back," he tells me. "I found to my surprise they describe a commission for artwork for the Opera House that had been executed and sent to Denmark, which was the tapestry."

Corbusier and Utzon met twice; the first time in mid-1959 in Paris, and again several months later. "The notes that I've seen suggest that they spoke about caves and cave-like spaces and Corbu thought of incorporating this into his art," Moulis says. The men apparently discussed several kinds of Corbusier artworks – tapestries, paintings, enamels and animal motifs – that might work in Sydney. 

"From my investigation it was the tapestry which most closely connected with the Opera House as a design because of the fact that Le Corbusier used drawings that were given to him as material for elements within the tapestry," Moulis says. "That was the key moment of my research."

Adding weight to his theory are letters written between November 17, 1959, and October 1, 1960. These trace a series of payments made by Utzon to Le Corbusier for "sketches for the Sydney Opera House", a "sample of tapestry by Monsieur Le Corbusier for the Sydney Opera House" and "sketches and samples of tapestry made in connection with the Sydney Opera House". 

Moulis explains that the sailboat motif is in fact a tracing of a form model of the Opera House shells, in reverse. "He flipped it." In the white area of the tapestry Moulis sees the harbour; in the red area he sees the city. It is a vision, in code, of the Opera House in its distinctive urban-aquatic setting.

Le Corbusier's interest in tapestry as an art form is anchored to his vision of the modern urban "nomad" in the new automobile age. Twentieth-century man, constantly on the move, favours an artwork with architectural qualities that he can roll up and take with him. The Dice Are Cast is a tapestry of this kind. Corbu kept a copy of the tapestry for himself. Utzon arranged for another to be bought by Ove Arup, his design engineer. The others were sold privately.

Two days later I catch up with Jan Utzon at the Opera House. We've met twice before; when I interviewed him in the Utzon home in Denmark in 2013 the tapestry was hanging behind him. I ask whether he thinks the tapestry was commissioned for the family home or for the Opera House. "It was designed for my father's dining room," Jan replies, a "sample of what could hang at the Opera House."

He explains how Le Corbusier sent proposals for a tapestry sketched on A3-sized paper to the Hellebæk address. "My father chose one for the house. Ideally, it would have been for the Opera House but it was way ahead of time. He had to plan ahead and think: what would I want on these walls?

"As a trial he thought he would like to have made some tapestries that fitted the walls of the Opera House but he couldn't do that. At least he could have Le Corbusier make one that could fit in the home and he could walk around and look at it and get a feeling for what could be in the Opera House. So it was created in connection of his plans for the Opera House, even though it remained back in Denmark."

Soon after speaking to Jan I pay a visit to the Fondation Le Corbusier in Paris. Housed at an early building of Corbu's, the 1923 Maison la Roche, it serves as a library, administrative centre, art gallery and vivid example of the architect's genius. 

The foundation's director, Michel Richard, has raided the archive for our meeting, giving me access to the correspondence between Corbu and Utzon. Richard is fond of Corbu's tapestries, only about 28 of which were made. But he's convinced The Dice Are Cast was not commissioned directly for the Opera House. I ask about the motif that appears to be a little yellow sailboat. Moulis interprets it as an image in reverse of the Opera House shells. It could alternatively be a knowing nod to Sydney Harbour. Richard believes it is exactly what it looks like: a sailboat. Corbu loved the sea and boats.

Richard shows me a photograph of a 1939 wall mural that contains an earlier version of the two dominant images in The Dice Are Cast. On the right is the motif that looks like a face enfolding a letter P. Moulis interprets this as a reference to the old Bennelong Point and its tram depot. But here is its first iteration, two decades before the Utzon tapestry. On the other side of the 1939 mural is an earlier, more elaborate version of the feminine form seen on the left side of The Dice Are Cast.

I ask Richard if he agrees with Jan Utzon that The Dice Are Cast was a prototype of what could work at the Opera House. "I don't even think the tapestry that was purchased by Utzon was a prototype for anything," he says. "I think what Le Corbusier imagined for the Opera House was quite a new project. Of course it's very difficult to know with certainty, because they talked when they met at Le Corbusier's studio and you can see what is left of the conversation." He holds up a sketch Le Corbusier produced after the meeting. "Just this."

While researching Le Corbusier's later work, I find a 1952 image with a version of the small green oval hovering above four jagged shapes. And when I look over the records Corbusier made of his first, June 1959, meeting with Utzon, I find a note which, translated into English, reads: "Sydney Opera// rocky ambience = enamel panels = murals". And then, in the line below: "3 acoustic tapestries".

I mention the motifs in these earlier works to Moulis, who has seen one of them. "I based my argument for the connection between the Bennelong site plan and the 'face' figure on interpretation and architectural analysis, noting their strong resemblance and being aware that Le Corbusier re-uses images in his compositions." He points out that his research is based on archives from the Fondation and the State Library of NSW.

Richard says Le Corbusier's tapestries come in two kinds: smaller, domestic tapestries such as The Dice Are Cast; and larger acoustic tapestries of the kind he designed for his model city in Chandigarh , India. One of these measures 144 square metres; eight others clock in at 64 square metres.

We may never know what Utzon planned to do with The Dice Are Cast once he'd finished the exterior of the Opera House and turned his mind to the interiors. He never got that far. In an Opera House video about the tapestry, Jan Utzon talks about his father's desire to fill the interior with contemporary art.

"He could not of course convince anybody at that stage of the building when ... the only thing built was the podium. He thought he had better get going with the process of procuring artwork. And he asked and talked to Corbusier about what can we do here and what can we do there. And he thought, well maybe if you can make a tapestry for our dining room wall, at least we have one going and so we can see that as an example of what can go into the Opera House, and that can be moved to the Opera House once completed." 

Chief executive Herron believes that either way, the tapestry's connection with the building is profound. "It is an invaluable piece of the Opera House's rich history and a wonderful insight into Jørn Utzon's original vision."  

Quite apart from its relationship to Sydney and Utzon, the tapestry is a pointer to one of the paradoxes of modernism. There's a tendency to see the movement that defined 20th-century art, architecture and urbanism as a rejection of the past in favour of a sterile, machine-like future. Modernism may have yearned for the geometric purity of abstract form and hygienic urban space, but it was never pure in its puritanism. Picasso turned to the primitive art of Africa, Matisse to the intoxications of Algiers, and Le Corbusier, the high priest of purist architectural modernism, returned to tapestry, a traditional art form associated with the medieval courts of Burgundy and Flanders. And he made it new.

Ultimately The Dice Are Cast connects with something bigger than Sydney and its Opera House: the DNA of modernism itself. *