The purpose of this paper is to elucidate the role of painting in Le Corbusier’s concehpt of the syntèse des arts. In the late of 1920s, Le Corbusier began to introduce les objets à réaction poétique into his paintings. These heterogeneous objects made inefficient the Purist technique of painting. In the 1930s, he attempted to achieve the synthesis of homogeneous objects through the countless paintings of “women”. The pseudo-synthesis of the “women”, however, was still a long way from his original goal. In the 1950s, he solved the problem of the synthesis of the heterogeneous objects through the “bull” that served as a model for the synthèse des arts.
