Minotaur – the rough love story between Lily Stockman and Le Corbusier in Paris

Lily Stockman on display at Maison La Roche, with an exhibition that follows her “obsession” with Le Corbusier, blending Greek mythology and a shared past in India

Minotaur by Lily Stockman at Maison La Roche in Paris

A Minotaur has arrived at Le Corbusier’s Maison La Roche in Paris. Lily Stockman brought it. She is the first female and American artist to exhibit in the villa’s spaces in the 16th arrondissement, home to the Fondation Le Corbusier. The exhibition, Minotaur, in collaboration with MASSIMODECARLO, remains open until June 29th. It is a dialogue between the spaces of the Maison and Stockman’s eleven paintings, conceived to connect the often invisible dots linking French and American painting. Additionally, it is an homage to Le Corbusier, celebrating forms and colors up until now unknown to Stockman’s brush, and an attempt to replicate on canvas the architectural partitioning of the Maison itself.

Stockman and Le Corbusier – Studies at Harvard’s Carpenter Center

Stockman, born in Providence in 1982 but long based in Los Angeles, has a long history with “Corbu,” as she affectionately calls Le Corbusier: “It feels like I’ve been chasing him my whole life, a bit like he’s my imaginary boyfriend who doesn’t know I exist.” The modernist master’s influence on her began by chance while she was studying at Harvard in the only building he designed in the United States, the Carpenter Center. She had no idea who Le Corbusier was at the time. “I learned to paint in this brutalist, austere, and masculine building. When it was built, it sparked many protests from Harvard’s snobbish purists, who saw it as a parody of architecture, a perversion of the Georgian style of the campus. Of course, now it’s everyone’s favorite“, says Stockman.

“The Carpenter Center,” she continues, “was designed to dissolve the classic divisions of internal spaces. There’s a large open-plan studio that is entirely antithetical to Harvard’s hierarchical nature. So this concrete building became home to all the art kids of the campus. We were on the third floor, a classic Le Corbusier space: curved walls, about thirty small windows. I learned what volume is, space, how light influences paintings. There’s a big ramp at the entrance: Le Corbusier said he wanted to avoid the percussive force of the body and internal organs moving when you go downstairs. During the harsh Boston winters, it was always frozen. We would sit on cafeteria trays and slide down. This austere and serious building was our playground.”

Minotaur – Between Architecture, Purism, and Greek Mythology

Stockman encountered Le Corbusier again, by chance, in Chandigarh, India, a country she has visited “at least 18 times” since her first trip there for an apprenticeship. “After the partition of Punjab, the city of Lahore went to Pakistan. Le Corbusier was hired to design a new center, which was to become somewhat of a flag of democracy in this part of Asia. Around the government buildings, you have reflecting pools. I thought about them while preparing Minotaur: some floors of Maison La Roche have highly polished cement or reflective tiles. I worked not only thinking of mirroring the palace’s symmetries in my paintings but also those between the floors and the walls.” This is the third chapter of her love story with “Corbu,” who was also a painter. Minotaur aims to highlight the paintings and their colors, somewhat like “the pinnacle of the brief experience of purism as opposed to cubism,” theorized by Le Corbusier along with Ozenfant towards the end of the first decade of the 1900s.

What does the Minotaur have to do with all this? Again, there is a thread connecting Stockman and Le Corbusier, starting from India but ending in ancient Greece. This too was discovered by chance. Stockman says: “While researching for the exhibition, I came across a series of collages I didn’t know about. Upon returning from India, Le Corbusier began incorporating the imagery of the bull into his drawings. He did this also because of his competitive strike with Picasso, who kind of coopted the Spanish bull iconography as his own. However, Le Corbusier was obsessed with Greek mythology. He used the animal differently: the collages have a humorous element that is entirely antithetical to his dogmatic architecture. I like to think that later on in life he loosened up and became freer, even if they are just small collages.”

Maison La Roche – The Labyrinthine Design of the House and the Linden Trees of Paris

Stockman tried to evoke the Minotaur’s labyrinth when designing the exhibition that eventually took this name. “For Maison La Roche, Le Corbusier talked about dissolving spaces into the most elementary form possible. The idea was to obtain a point in a room from which you could see into the other rooms as well. This is more or less the same principle behind the Greek labyrinth. We all know that in the end, the Minotaur lost his head. I loved the idea of cutting the head and putting it onto me, standing in the middle of the building and decorating the domestic spaces, but also engaging in a critical way with the building itself”.

However, she had never been to Maison La Roche. To imagine the villa’s Minotaur, she had to rely on technology. On one hand, she explains, she watched the videos posted on TikTok by those working there every day to study the spaces in detail, starting with the light, and creating cut outs replicas in scale of the paintings that would later go on the walls. She also embraced another lesson from Le Corbusier: “He taught me how to bring the outside inside. This is somewhat the key to the entire exhibition. From Google Street View, I looked at the trees surrounding Maison La Roche because each species creates different lighting conditions. There are many linden trees there with heart-shaped leaves that let a lot of light through. Being June, a lot of light enters every part of the building. Then I used the shapes of the windows and the architecture as a leitmotif in the paintings.” There is a sort of “mimicry and visual rhyming” at the origin of the exhibition that makes the works “musical” in their relationship with the Maison: in some cases, the light from the tiles is reflected on the paintings themselves.

Lily Stockman’s Colors

Between abstraction and geometry, the central point in Stockman’s art is color, which gives life to form. She usually chooses shades that remind her of what she has around at a precise moment. She provides an example: “In Los Angeles, during the winter, there are a lot of camellias, so my paintings tend to be red and pink.” This time, she followed the villa’s polychromy. Terra di Siena, cerulean blue, ultramarine blue, Paris green. She completed it: “I have never used such aggressive colors, from blue to orange, from brown to flaming bright red.” To work with the lights, she used a mixture of lavender spike oil – a natural solvent used since the Reinassance – to make the paint matte and walnut oil to make it shiny. In this way the paintings “capture the light in different ways depending on where you look at them, almost as if there was a secret drawing inside.” Scattered among Stockman’s canvases are tributes that go beyond Le Corbusier. Sometimes they’re longing  for Apollinaire’s cubism, other times for Monet’s landscapes. In Minotaur, there are petals and hearts but also suggestions that refer to Chandigarh and more complex mental passages. Among these is Metronome, where orange buttresses suggest the effect of a sundial.

Lily Stockman’s Floral World from a Farm in New Jersey to Derek Jarman’s Garden in Kent

Stockman’s works often seem to reference the vagina and the female body. Not exactly, she clarifies: it is more about floral forms. Plants are everywhere in her lexicon. Not only because she also studied botany and forestry at Harvard. It starts from childhood: “I grew up in a hay farm. I spent summer afternoons pulling hay wagons around and around. As I grew up, I realized that I use the brush in the same way. I approach the surface of a painting like a flat landscape. When I put paint on the canvas, I then push it off with a scrappy old brush. Lines form that remind me a lot of the windrows – the rows of cut hay left to dry in the field”.

The bucolic place where Stockman grew up is in New Jersey. It may come as a surprise, but that’s what it is: “It’s not just The Sopranos or Jersey Shore.” Her house had a fenced garden with fruits and vegetables. Over time, it became some sort of a primordial place: “Outside there was the external world, inside there was this magical space made of watermelons and flowers. I’ve always been interested in that kind of orderly chaos that a garden brings. Some of my favorite artists had the same passion”.’ She mentions Derek Jarman, a British director, screenwriter, and writer who died of AIDS in 1994. “He is my hero, my Oracle of Delphi. As he got sicker, he moved to the coast of Kent and bought a small fisherman’s cottage. In a place constantly beaten by the wind, where it is difficult to grow anything, he made a garden out there on the rocks, just with things that would actually grow there. I went there a few years ago. Now you have wild poppies around. The effort was enormous, the risult so minor at the beginning. But now you can see the fruits of this work”.

Apprenticeships between female thangka painting in Mongolia and the Mughal tradition in India

Another key location in Stockman’s journey is Mongolia, where she studied Buddhist thangka painting techniques for five months during her years at Harvard. “I had to chase down the art department to let me go. They weren’t very happy about students going abroad and getting credits. But I did it: I lived with nomadic families in the middle of the steppe. I grew up in a magical but closed world, I didn’t travel much as a child. At Harvard, I realized my painting references were entirely Eurocentric, and I wanted to see what else was out there. After the steppe, I went to the capital, Ulaanbaatar, where there was a single art gallery. There I met a painter and asked if I could assist her. Initially, I cleaned brushes, then I did the base painting, and she would draw Buddhist iconographies over it. I carried with me a kind of flamboyant imaginary landscape”.

Then, in 2010 – before moving to New York University – Stockman arrived in Jaipur, India. She studied pigments and the traditional Mughal miniature painting technique. “I learned to use the squirrel hair brush and to execute tiny movements, precision, control, clean lines. There, artists are very contained and concise, then with a flick of the wrist they work on some details, like the feathers of a bird, and it’s like an explosion of joy.” From India and Mongolia, Stockman returned home with a technical skill set that she later abandoned over the years for a style of painting that, she says, prefers to be “a bit imprecise.”

Lily Stockman, the girl from the East Coast of the United States who doesn’t want to leave Los Angeles

Then there’s all the light of Los Angeles and California in Stockman’s poetics. She is not intent on leaving the city, a choice common to many East Coast natives who decided to move West. She says, “I came to Los Angeles to work with a gallery. I was living in Joshua Tree, down in the Mojave Desert. I felt New York was home and, like all New Yorkers, I had an old-fashioned and provincial idea of what Los Angeles was. I was wrong: it seemed like the garden of paradise. Now it’s very expensive, but when I arrived, I saw how many opportunities it offered. It was like having a clandestine love affair with the city: I fell in love with the architecture, the culture, the plants that conquer everything. I decided to raise my family here. Now I have three children.”

More than anything else, it was the Los Angeles mentality that convinced her: “I have a great group of artist friends. Many women with great careers are also mothers. Here it’s not a problem, but in New York there’s still a tendency to keep the artistic career and family separate, it’s more difficult.” Until last year, Stockman shared a studio with four other women: sculptors Ruby Neri and Megan Reed, and painters Hilary Pecis and Austin Weiner. They had taken over an abandoned warehouse in Frogtown, on the banks of the Los Angeles River. Now she has moved just a bit further away, but she’still with “other artist friends: we are a very thight community.”

Lily Stockman 

Lily Stockman was born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1982. She studied at Harvard and New York University and completed two apprenticeships in Mongolia and India. Today, she lives and works in Los Angeles and Yucca Valley. Her works are in the permanent collections of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Miami, LA MOCA, the Phoenix Art Museum, and the Orange County Museum of Art, where she is currently included in the California Biennial 2022: Pacific Gold.

Giacomo Cadeddu