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As editor of a short-lived magazine, the painter, Amédée Ozenfant, had written about cubism as a form of "purism" that removed art's extraneous baggage. Idealistic Swiss architect Charles-Édouard Jeanneret (a.k.a. Le Corbusier) had returned from travels through Europe and the Mediterranean convinced that the best buildings were based on modular geometric forms.
Together, the two developed an aesthetic based on what they saw as the overwhelming human need for order and the "remarkable refinement and purity" of machines. Both men painted distinctively geometric and architectural still lifes, in which bottles, vases, or even a pile of plates took on the forms of Greek columns. Joined by Fernand Léger, whose paintings included geometric human figures, more obvious references to machinery, and a brighter palette, the Purists presented their vision at the 1925 International Exposition in Paris.
The most intriguing chapter in this otherwise straightforward art history book is Tag Gronberg's essay on how the Esprit Nouveau pavilion at the exposition offered a "masculine" counterpart to the feminized postwar image of Paris. While the fashion and beauty industries evoked "a modern consumer culture defined in terms of mobility and constant change," the Purists celebrated "the engineer's aesthetic" and praised the standardized design of men's clothing.
This modestly sized, elegantly designed volume--which reproduces a good number of the paintings in color, though in a small scale that doesn't do full justice to their eccentric beauty--accompanies an exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (through August 5, 2001). --Cathy Curtis
Francoise Ducros is the world's leading expert on Amédée Ozenfant.
Tag Gronberg is head of the School of History of Art, Film, and Visual Media at the University of London's Birkbeck College.
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Book Description Hardcover. Condition: New. Dust Jacket Condition: New. 1st Edition. 1st Edition hardcover, 192 pp. w/ color and b&w plates throughout. Issued to accompany 2001 exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum, this work examines the rise of Cubism as a purist movement in post World War I Paris led by Amédée Ozenfant, Charles-Édouard Jeanneret (a.k.a. Le Corbusier) and Fernand Léger. Book Condition : New; still shrink wrapped. Seller Inventory # 222958
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