Amédée Ozenfant was a French cubist painter

Painting

Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a surface . The application of the medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush but other objects can be used. In art, the term painting describes both the act and the result of the action. However, painting is...

.

He was born into a bourgeois family in Saint-Quentin, Aisne

Aisne

Aisne is a department in the northern part of France named after the Aisne River.- History :Aisne is one of the original 83 departments created during the French Revolution on 4 March 1790. It was created from parts of the former provinces of Île-de-France, Picardie, and Champagne.Most of the old...

 and was educated at Dominican

Dominican Order

The Order of Preachers , after the 15th century more commonly known as the Dominican Order or Dominicans, is a Catholic religious order founded by Saint Dominic and approved by Pope Honorius III on 22 December 1216 in France...

 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

Paris

Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

, where he studied the decorative arts, first with Maurice Pillard Verneuil

Maurice Pillard Verneuil

Maurice Pillard Verneuil was a French artist and decorator in the Art nouveau movement.He was born in Saint-Quentin, France. Maurice Pillard Verneuil was a learned his trade from the Swiss designer Eugene Grasset. Maurice Pillard Verneuil then went on to become a well-known artist and designer...

 and later with Charles Cottet

Charles Cottet

Charles Cottet , French painter, was born at Le Puy-en-Velay and died in Paris. A famed post-impressionist, Cottet is known for his dark, evocative painting of rural Brittany and seascapes...

. He also befriended Roger de La Fresnaye

Roger de La Fresnaye

Roger de La Fresnaye was a French cubist painter.-Early years and education:La Fresnaye was born in Le Mans where his father, an officer in the French army, was temporarily stationed. The La Fresnayes were an aristocratic family whose ancestral home, the Château de La Fresnaye, is in Falaise...

 and André Dunoyer de Segonzac.

Collaboration with Le Corbusier and development of Purism

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

Max Jacob

Max Jacob was a French poet, painter, writer, and critic.-Life and career:After spending his childhood in Quimper, Brittany, France, he enrolled in the Paris Colonial School, which he left in 1897 for an artistic career...

 and Guillaume Apollinaire

Guillaume Apollinaire

Wilhelm Albert Włodzimierz Apolinary Kostrowicki, known as Guillaume Apollinaire was a French poet, playwright, short story writer, novelist, and art critic born in Italy to a Polish mother....

, Ozenfant founded the magazine L’Elan, which he edited until 1916, and his theories of Purism

Purism

Purism was a form of Cubism advocated by the French painter Amédée Ozenfant and the architect Charles-Edouard Jeanneret . Purism rejected the decorative trend of cubism and advocated a return to clear, ordered forms that were expressive of the modern machine age as documented in their 1918 book...

 began to develop. He met the Swiss architect

Architect

An architect is a person trained in the planning, design and oversight of the construction of buildings. To practice architecture means to offer or render services in connection with the design and construction of a building, or group of buildings and the space within the site surrounding the...

 and painter Charles-Edouard Jeanneret (Le Corbusier

Le Corbusier

Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, better known as Le Corbusier , was a Swiss-born French architect, designer, urbanist, writer and painter, famous for being one of the pioneers of what now is called modern architecture. He was born in Switzerland and became a French citizen in 1930...

) 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

Fernand Léger

Joseph Fernand Henri Léger was a French painter, sculptor, and filmmaker. In his early works he created a personal form of Cubism which he gradually modified into a more figurative, populist style...

, where they both taught with Aleksandra Ekster

Aleksandra Ekster

Aleksandra Aleksandrovna Ekster was a Russian-French painter and designer.-Biography:-Childhood:...

 and Marie Laurencin

Marie Laurencin

Marie Laurencin was a French painter and printmaker. -Biography:Laurencin was born in Paris, where she was raised by her mother and lived much of her life. At 18, she studied porcelain painting in Sèvres...

. 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.

His influence on the use of colour in England

He later founded his own atelier, l’Académie Ozenfant, in the residence and studio that Le Corbusier had designed for him. He moved to London

London

London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...

 in 1936, where he set up the Ozenfant Academy of Fine Arts in May of that year, before moving to New York

New York

New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...

 some two years later.

In the early Purist manifestos, colour was deemed secondary to form, and this could be seen in the careful placing of colour to reinforce discrete architectural elements by Le Corbusier in his work of the mid-1920s. However, by the time he was in England, Ozenfant had refined his ideas about colour and outlined many of these in the six articles on the subject that he wrote for the Architectural Review

Architectural Review

The Architectural Review is a monthly international architectural magazine published in London since 1896. Articles cover the built environment which includes landscape, building design, interior design and urbanism as well as theory of these subjects....

. Colour was now regarded as an essential element of architecture, rather than something considered by the architect while his work was being erected. Colour always modifies the form of the building and should receive more careful attention.

We must endeavour to introduce a little order into this business, or at least sense into a great deal of it. But what is sense without order? We must try to find some method of arriving at some sort of order—one that will at least enable us to escape from this vagueness in the design of colour.

Ozenfant’s revised thoughts on the importance of colour were partly due to the influence of the artist Paul Signac

Paul Signac

Paul Signac was a French neo-impressionist painter who, working with Georges Seurat, helped develop the pointillist style.-Biography:Paul Victor Jules Signac was born in Paris on 11 November 1863...

 and his theories on Divisionism

Divisionism

Divisionism was the characteristic style in Neo-Impressionist painting defined by the separation of colors into individual dots or patches which interacted optically....

. Signac maintained that the Neo-Impressionist

Neo-impressionism

Neo-impressionism was coined by French art critic Félix Fénéon in 1886 to describe an art movement founded by Georges Seurat. Seurat’s greatest masterpiece, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, marked the beginning of this movement when it first made its appearance at an exhibition...

 technique of applying brushstrokes obtained the maximum brightness, colour, and harmony. Unlike the techniques used by the earlier Impressionists

Impressionism

Impressionism was a 19th-century art movement that originated with a group of Paris-based artists whose independent exhibitions brought them to prominence during the 1870s and 1880s...

, patches of colours remained distinct, blending when viewed at a distance. In this instance, when no fusion of the colours takes place, the interaction is called “simultaneous contrast”, a condition in which colours merely influence one another by proximity. This technique prevents the muddiness or darkening that result when patches of colour actually run into each other. It was an extension of this technique that was recommended by Ozenfant for achieving “colour solidity” in architecture, altering colours visually by contrast to create the illusion of solidity.

This notion of “solidity” increasingly became an issue as the nature of modern construction changed, especially when dealing with such things as the lightweight partition

Cubicle

Тhe cubicle, cubicle desk, office cubicle or cubicle workstation is a partially enclosed workspace, separated from neighboring workspaces by partitions that are usually tall...

 and the glass curtain wall

Curtain wall

A curtain wall is an outer covering of a building in which the outer walls are non-structural, but merely keep out the weather. As the curtain wall is non-structural it can be made of a lightweight material reducing construction costs. When glass is used as the curtain wall, a great advantage is...

.

In 1937 Ozenfant had said:

I believe that an immense service would be done to architects, decorators, house-painters etc., if a chart especially adapted to their particular requirements were established. This chart might contain about a hundred hues.

Ozenfant’s articles on colour were read with interest, particularly by:

…the students at the Architectural Association (AA), for example, but even for David Medd, a student at the AA who later authored the color standards for British schools, Ozenfant had already gone to the United States by the time he inquired about the course at the Academy.

The effect of his words can be seen in a number of articles on colour published in England shortly after the Second World War. Indeed, we are told in 1956 that they had a direct influence on the decoration of some of the early post-war schools.

Final years

The Ozenfant School of Fine Arts in New York was in operation from 1939 until 1955. Ozenfant also 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

Cannes

Cannes is one of the best-known cities of the French Riviera, a busy tourist destination and host of the annual Cannes Film Festival. It is a Commune of France in the Alpes-Maritimes department....

 in 1966.

Collections

The Guggenheim Museum

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum is a well-known museum located on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City, United States. It is the permanent home to a renowned collection of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, early Modern, and contemporary art and also features special exhibitions...

 (New York City), the Hermitage Museum

Hermitage Museum

The State Hermitage is a museum of art and culture in Saint Petersburg, Russia. One of the largest and oldest museums of the world, it was founded in 1764 by Catherine the Great and has been opened to the public since 1852. Its collections, of which only a small part is on permanent display,...

, the Honolulu Academy of Arts

Honolulu Academy of Arts

The Honolulu Academy of Arts is an art museum in Honolulu in the state of Hawaii. Since its founding in 1922 by Anna Rice Cooke and opening April 8, 1927, its collections have grown to over 40,000 works of art.-Description:...

, Kunstmuseum Basel (Switzerland), the Louvre

Louvre

The Musée du Louvre – in English, the Louvre Museum or simply the Louvre – is one of the world's largest museums, the most visited art museum in the world and a historic monument. A central landmark of Paris, it is located on the Right Bank of the Seine in the 1st arrondissement...

, the Museum of Modern Art

Museum of Modern Art

The Museum of Modern Art is an art museum in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the world...

 (New York City), Muzeum Sztuki (Lodz, Poland), the National Gallery of Australia

National Gallery of Australia

The National Gallery of Australia is the national art gallery of Australia, holding more than 120,000 works of art. It was established in 1967 by the Australian government as a national public art gallery.- Establishment :...

 (Canberra), the Philadelphia Museum of Art

Philadelphia Museum of Art

The Philadelphia Museum of Art is among the largest art museums in the United States. It is located at the west end of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia's Fairmount Park. The Museum was established in 1876 in conjunction with the Centennial Exposition of the same year...

, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is a modern art museum located in San Francisco, California. A nonprofit organization, SFMOMA holds an internationally recognized collection of modern and contemporary art and was the first museum on the West Coast devoted solely to 20th century art...

, the Tate Gallery

Tate Gallery

The Tate is an institution that houses the United Kingdom's national collection of British Art, and International Modern and Contemporary Art...

 (London) and the Walker Art Center

Walker Art Center

The Walker Art Center is a contemporary art center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States. The Walker is considered one of the nation's "big five" museums for modern art along with the Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum and the Hirshhorn...

(Minnesota) are among the public collections holding works by Amédée Ozenfant.

External links

• Artcyclopedia - Links to Ozenfant's works