I painted the hallway walls
as a child In thick lines of .
Spanish White.
Poor reproductions of Birkenhead Street in
1998.
~
My mother followed behind
with a roller brush wet with 1/4 Spanish White
I watched the pictures
fall away,
and traced the lines underneath with my brush;
white on white, like ghosts.
~
Between 1938 and 1939, the famed
Le Courbusier stood naked painting
flourishes of colour and sex
on the Côte d’Azur;
urinating on the walls of Eileen Gray’s masterpiece E.1027.
~
Gray once said in response to Le Courbusier:
‘A house is not a machine to live in […]
It is the shell of man—
his extension,
his release,
his spiritual emanation.’ 1
~
Because of his greatness
the paintings are left intact,
graffiti like.
Painted over her extension, release,
her spiritual emanation.
Because a woman couldn’t be so great.
~
I painted the hallway walls
as a child
In thick lines of 1/4 Spanish White.
Poor reproductions
of Birkenhead Street in
1998.
~
My mother followed behind
with a roller brush wet with 1/4 Spanish White.
I was sorry to see my pictures
disappear,
~
like ghosts.
~
1 Alistair Gordon, Le Corbusier’s Role in the Controversy Over Eileen Gray’s E.1027 in The Wall Street Journal: http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324354704578637901327433828, accessed 11/01/2017