Amédée Ozenfant

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Guitar and Bottles (Guitare et bouteilles), 1920. Peggy Guggenheim Collection.

Amédée Ozenfant (15 April 1886 - 4 May 1966) was a French cubist painter.

He was born into a bourgeois family in Saint-Quentin, Aisne and was educated at Dominican colleges in Saint-Sébastien. After completing his education he returned to Saint-Quentin and began painting in watercolour and pastels.

In 1904 he attended a drawing course run by Jules-Alexandre Patrouillard Degrave at the Ecole Municipale de Dessin Quentin Delatour in Saint-Quentin. In 1905 he travelled to Paris, where he studied the decorative arts, first with Maurice Verneuil and later with Charles Cottet. He also befriended Roger de La Fresnaye and André Dunoyer de Segonzac.

Between 1909 and 1913 he travelled to Russia, Italy, Belgium, and the Netherlands and attended lectures at the Collège de France in Paris. In 1915, in collaboration with Max Jacob and Guillaume Apollinaire, Ozenfant founded the magazine L’Elan, which he edited until 1917, and his theories of Purism began to develop. He met the Swiss architect and painter Charles-Edouard Jeanneret (Le Corbusier) in 1917, and they jointly expounded the doctrines of Purism in their book Après le cubisme. Its publication coincided with the first Purist exhibition, held at the Galerie Thomas in Paris in 1917, in which Ozenfant exhibited. There was a further collaboration between them on the journal L’Esprit nouveau, which was published from 1920 to 1925.

A second Purist exhibition was held at the Galerie Druet, Paris, in 1921 in which Ozenfant again exhibited. In 1924 he opened a free studio in Paris with Fernand Léger, where they both taught with Alexandra Exter and Marie Laurencin. Ozenfant and Le Corbusier wrote La Peinture moderne in 1925 and in 1928 Ozenfant published Art. This was subsequently published in English as The Foundations of Modern Art in 1931. In this he fully expounds his theory of Purism, and it is remarkable for its idiosyncratic and aphoristic style.

Ozenfant taught and lectured widely in the United States until 1955, when he returned to France. He remained there for the rest of his life and died in Cannes in 1966.