Purism

Purism, referring to the arts, was a movement that took place between 1918–1925 that influenced French painting and architecture. Purism was led by Amédée Ozenfant and Charles Edouard Jeanneret (Le Corbusier). Ozenfant and Le Corbusier created a variation of Cubist movement and called it Purism.^[1]

Amédée Ozenfant

Amédée Ozenfant was the creator (along with Le Corbusier) of Purism. In Susan Ball's book, Ball explains that Purism was an attempt to restore regularity in a war-torn France post World War I.^[1]

L' Esprit Nouveau

Ozenfant and Le Corbusier ran an art magazine called L’ Esprit Nouveau spanning from 1920–1925 that was used as propaganda towards their Purist movement.^[1]

Purist Manifesto

The Purist Manifesto is worth mentioning because it helps describe rules that Ozenfant and Le Corbusier created to govern the Purist movement.^[1]

• Purism does not intend to be a scientific art, which it is in no sense.
• Cubism has become a decorative art of romantic ornamentism.
• There is a hierarchy in the arts: decorative art is at the base, the human figure at the summit.
• Painting is as good as the intrinsic qualities of its plastic elements, not their representative or narrative possibilities.
• Purism wants to conceive clearly, execute loyally, exactly without deceits; it abandons troubled conceptions, summary or bristling executions. A serious art must banish all techniques not faithful to the real value of the conception.
• Art consists in the conception before anything else.
• Technique is only a tool, humbly at the service of the conception.
• Purism fears the bizarre and the original. It seeks the pure element in order to reconstruct organized paintings that seem to be facts from nature herself.
• The method must be sure enough not to hinder the conception.
• Purism does not believe that returning to nature signifies the copying of nature.
• It admits all deformation is justified by the search for the invariant.
• All liberties are accepted in art except those that are unclear.^[1]

Notes

References

• Ball, Susan L. Ozenfant and Purism: The Evolution of a Style 1915–1930, Ann Arbor; UMI research Press, 1981. Print