COLOGNE.- This exhibition André Bauchant / Le Corbusier: Autodidacts of the Avant-Garde will be the first dedicated to the friendship and professional connection between the gardener and artist André Bauchant (1873–1958) and the architect Le Corbusier (1887–1965). It features paintings by Bauchant from the Zander Collection in Cologne and Fondation Le Corbusier in Paris, alongside archival material and an upcoming catalog publishing their lifelong correspondence.

Throughout his life, André Bauchant worked as a gardener and operated a tree nursery in the Touraine region of France. During World War I, he was commissioned to produce telemetric drawings—an experience that revealed his remarkable talent for landscape and inspired him to pursue painting professionally.

When Bauchant submitted works to the Salon d’Automne in Paris for the first time in 1921, Le Corbusier was immediately struck by his distinctive visual language—characterized by a lyrical treatment of nature and the poetic rendering of mythological, biblical, and historical subjects. He visited Bauchant in the Touraine, became his first collector, and, together with Amédée Ozenfant, wrote the first review for L’Esprit Nouveau.

Over the following thirty years, he actively promoted the painter, helping to establish connections with collectors, curators, and gallerists such as Jeanne Bucher, as well as with Sergei Diaghilev director of the Ballets Russes. For Le Corbusier, Bauchant’s practice came to embody a form of artistic creation free from academic conventions and institutional constraints. He regarded this autonomy as the essential strength of autodidactic artists, who, working independently, achieved a direct and authentic mode of expression—a notion Le Corbusier himself would later adopt as part of his own self-image.

The exhibition is curated by Regina Barunke, art historian and Head of Publications at MMK Frankfurt, at the invitation of the Zander Collection. Special thanks go to the family of André Bauchant and to Fondation Le Corbusier for their support in realizing this exhibition. Grateful acknowledgment is also extended to the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia and to Kunststiftung NRW for their generous funding.

Zander Collection

Founded by Charlotte Zander, the Zander Collection is one of the leading collections of self-taught art. For more than sixty years, the gallerist and collector Charlotte Zander (1930–2014) assembled masterpieces of “Naïve Art,” complemented by Art Brut and “Outsider Art,” of unique art-historical value.

In the 1950s, she became aware of André Bauchant, began exhibiting his works regularly in her Munich gallery from the 1970s onward, and thus significantly shaped his reception in German‑speaking countries. In 2001, she devoted a major retrospective to him at the Museum Charlotte Zander in Bönnigheim, Germany. Today, her collection includes more than 140 paintings and drawings by the artist—among them works from Le Corbusier’s collection particulière—making it one of the largest holdings of Bauchant's work worldwide. The Zander Collection is a nonprofit organization.