CategoriesStyles and Movements
Purism
A French movement of 1918–25, led by Amédée Ozenfant and Le Corbusier, that reduced Cubist still life to ordered, machine-age clarity.
No works indexed yet · 8 related artists
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About
In 1918 the painter Amédée Ozenfant and the Swiss-born architect Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, who would soon adopt the name Le Corbusier, published Après le cubisme, “After Cubism”. They admired Cubism but felt it had drifted into decoration and whim, and called for an art as rational and ordered as a well-engineered machine.
Purist paintings are still lifes of standard, mass-produced things: wine bottles, carafes, drinking glasses, pipes, guitars and stacks of plates, shown at once in profile and from above. Contours are drawn so that the edge of one object becomes the edge of the next, and the colours are cool and muted, with greys, creams, browns and soft greens. Look for flat, overlapping silhouettes, careful proportions and a calm, almost architectural balance. The pair spread their ideas through the journal L'Esprit Nouveau (1920–25), and the same clean geometry reappeared in Le Corbusier's white villas of the 1920s.
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