The Heidi Weber Collection

The Heidi Weber Collection is unique on a number of different levels. Firstly, the collector Heidi Weber, who was born in Münchenstein (Switzerland), does not descend from the upper middle class. Secondly, she has devoted herself exclusively to one artist: that is, to the life works of Le Corbusier, who is, perhaps, most famous as an architect, a town planer and as an architecture theoretician.

Heidi Weber's collection is unique in another respect. Unlike most of the world-famous collectors, The Heidi Weber Collection gathers top works that document “her” artist, i.e. the universal artist Le Corbusier, but Heidi Weber also works to promote the entire creative works produced by this extraordinary artistic
personality of the twentieth century.

Her merit in documenting the genesis of a work is incomparable; she has purchased the idea sketches which belong to the work and the preliminary and outline drawings and the oil sketches, including the gradual formation on growing picture sizes, which finally lead to the finished final work. In this, Heidi Weber is unique in the occidental history of art, collectors and collections. Her museum stands as a monument to her achievements, which she realised without any formal study in this area.

Her career as the owner of a private museum and of the most significant and wide-ranging Le Corbusier collection world-wide began modestly. It was only when she finally met Le Corbusier personally and when she obtained the exclusive right of representation i.e. the permission to produce the seated furniture which he had designed in the 1920s, that she was able to take charge of the works which he had created as a plastic artist.

 “Having collaborated with Le Corbusier and having acted on his behalf for a number of years, I won his confidence. Subsequently, he entrusted me with the exclusive right of reproducing and selling his paintings and his plastic works. I didn't become an art dealer in a traditional sense; however, only those who were really enthusiastic about Le Corbusier's works, or museums and foundations could acquire these works from me. Yet, during all those years, I rarely found appropriate buyers. I bought most of the paintings myself with the money I had earned as a successful interior designer, so that I could show positive sales figures to Le Corbusier.

My collection grew and grew...” (H. Weber in the introduction to her catalogue “Le Corbusier - Painter-Drawer-Sculptor-Poet,” Zurich, 1988).

The artistic reality captured in drawing could be ambivalently transformed in his works, whether they were based on a free theme taken from abstract forms of nature or an association of concrete structures or technical details. These realities were converted into drawings, lithographs, copperplates, oil paintings, sculptures, tapestries. In her art books and in realising her collection, Heidi Weber always emphasises the impressing unity of Le Corbusier's works.

The Heidi Weber Collection is simultaneously a personal confession of an intimate understanding of the great artist and it is also proof of her thesis of the universality of this venerated genius. However, Heidi Weber was not only a collector, she was also able to incite Le Corbusier to create certain works (lithographs, copperplates). But, above all, by collecting masterpieces which were not bought at random, but which came directly from his studio, she has been able to erect a monument to Le Corbusier which has withstood the test of time and which has outlived the twentieth century.