Purism

Purism, in painting, a variant of Cubism developed in France about 1918 by the painter Amédée Ozenfant and the architect and painter Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret).

Ozenfant and Le Corbusier, critical of what they perceived to be a decorative trend in Cubism, advocated a return to clear, precise, ordered forms that were expressive of the modern machine age. The collaboration of the two artists began with their book, Après le Cubisme (1918; “After Cubism”), and continued with essays published from 1920 to 1925 in their review, L’Esprit Nouveau. In an essay entitled “Purism,” Ozenfant and Le Corbusier defined painting as “an association of purified, related, and architectured elements.” This concept is reflected in their still life paintings, in which both artists presented clean, pure, integral forms.

Le Corbusier’s Still Life (1920) is a typical Purist painting. He purified the colour scheme to include only the neutrals—gray, black, and white—and monochromes of green. He applied the paint smoothly to enhance the sense of impersonal objectivity. He also repeated the rhythmic, curving contours of a guitar (a favourite Cubist motif, which the Purists eventually rejected for being too picturesque) in the shoulders of a bottle and in other objects on the table; by tilting the tops of the objects toward the spectator, he gave an added emphasis to their flatness. A motif of circles is echoed in the various openings of the bottles, pipes, and containers. In such works, Le Corbusier and Ozenfant were attempting to create a “symphony of consonant and architectured forms.”

As a movement in painting, Purism did not have an appreciable following. There were many painters, however, who, like the Purists, were attracted to a machine-inspired aesthetic; most notable were the French painter Fernand Léger and the American Precisionist painters of the 1920s.