Charles-Edouard JEANNERET known as LE CORBUSIER (1887-1965) The Embrace and the Spectre in front of a Black Door, 1931 Oil pastel, colored pencil and graphite on paper. Signed and dated lower right. 55,8 x 43,8 cm A certificate of Mr. Éric Mouchet, dated February 26, 2023, will be given to the buyer. The Embrace and the Specter in Front of a Black Door (1931) is one of the most mysterious images that Le Corbusier painted. The true historical title of this subject is not known to us. There are a few drawings and four oils of this same composition, painted in the same year, 1931, but on some of them there are two people, while others, like this gouache, clearly have three. The theme of embracing is recurrent in Le Corbusier's painted work during the 1930s, but always explicit and involving recognizable figures. In this case, a couple merged into a group in warm hues stands out against a black door and a gray silhouette. The hand that pushes back by presenting us with its inner face deployed, induces violence and the face simply sketched with two pencil strokes of the gray figure suggests a mask. No one knows what shadow Le Corbusier thinks is hovering over the kissing couple, and the subject is so disconcerting in the always positively progressive Corbusian corpus that one is led to wonder if some contemporary work, such as the silhouette in Murnau's Nosferatu (1922), or the Dali engraving that adorns the front copies of Breton and Éluard's L'Immaculée conception (1930), did not inspire Le Corbusier in a temporary surrealist vein.