Purism
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Purism, referring to the arts, was a movement that took place between 1918 and 1925 that influenced French painting and architecture. Purism was led by Amédée Ozenfant and Charles Edouard Jeanneret (Le Corbusier). Ozenfant and Le Corbusier formulated an aesthetic doctrine born from a criticism of
Cubism Cubism is an early-20th-century avant-garde art movement which began in Paris. It revolutionized painting and the visual arts, and sparked artistic innovations in music, ballet, literature, and architecture. Cubist subjects are analyzed, broke ...
and called it Purism: where objects are represented as elementary forms devoid of detail. The main concepts were presented in their short essay ''Après le Cubisme'' (After Cubism) published in 1918.


Post World War I

Le Corbusier and Ozenfant were the creators of Purism.
Fernand Léger Joseph Fernand Henri Léger (; February 4, 1881 – August 17, 1955) was a French painting, painter, sculpture, sculptor, and film director, filmmaker. In his early works he created a personal form of cubism (known as "tubism") which he gradually ...
was a principal associate. Purism was an attempt to restore regularity in a war-torn France post World War I. Unlike what they saw as 'decorative' fragmentation of objects in Cubism, Purism proposed a style of painting where elements were represented as robust simplified forms with minimal detail, while embracing technology and the machine. Purism culminated in Le Corbusier's ''Pavillon de l'Esprit Nouveau'' (Pavilion of the New Spirit), constructed for the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts in 1925. This included the work of Cubists Juan Gris and
Jacques Lipchitz Jacques Lipchitz (26 May 1973) was a Lithuanian-born French-American Cubist sculptor. Lipchitz retained highly figurative and legible components in his work leading up to 1915–16, after which naturalist and descriptive elements were muted, domi ...
. Following this exhibition the relationship between Le Corbusier and Ozenfant declined.


''L'Esprit Nouveau''

Ozenfant and Le Corbusier contributed extensively to an art magazine called ''L'Esprit Nouveau'' from 1920 to 1925 serving as a platform for propaganda towards their Purist movement.Eliel, Carol S. et al. (2001). ''L'Esprit Nouveau: Purism in Paris, 1918–1925''. New York: Harry Abrams, Inc.


Purist Manifesto

The Purist Manifesto lays out the rules Ozenfant and Le Corbusier created to govern the Purist movement. * 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.


See also

* Crystal Cubism * Section d'Or * Orphism *
De Stijl De Stijl (, ; 'The Style') was a Dutch art movement founded in 1917 by a group of artists and architects based in Leiden (Theo van Doesburg, Jacobus Oud, J.J.P. Oud), Voorburg (Vilmos Huszár, Jan Wils) and Laren, North Holland, Laren (Piet Mo ...
* Tubism * Raoul Albert La Roche


References


External links


Le Purisme, L'Esprit nouveau: revue internationale d'esthétique, 1920
Gallica, Bibliothèque nationale de France
Purisme, Agence photographique de la réunion des Musées nationaux
{{Authority control French art movements Modern art Art movements Abstract art 20th-century art movements 20th century in the arts Art movements in Europe French artist groups and collectives