Purism

Purism. A movement in French painting advocating an art of clarity and objectivity in tune with the machine age; its founders and sole exponents were Amedée Ozenfant and Le Corbusier, who met in Paris in 1918, and it flourished from then until 1925. Feeling that Cubism—‘the troubled art of a troubled time'—was degenerating into an art of decoration, they regarded their association as a call for order, or as they put it, ‘a campaign for the reconstitution of a healthy art', their object being to ‘inoculate artists with the spirit of the age'. They set great store by ‘the lessons inherent in the precision of machinery’ and held that emotion and expressiveness should be strictly excluded from art, apart from the beauty of functional efficiency—the ‘mathematical lyricism’ that is the proper response to a well-composed picture. Their characteristic paintings are still-lifes—cool, clear, almost diagrammatically flat, and impersonally finished.

Despite the anti-emotionalism of this functionalist outlook, Ozenfant and Le Corbusier advocated Purism with missionary fervour and dogmatic certainty. Ozenfant had begun the attack on Cubism with an article in his periodical L'Élan in 1916, but as a movement Purism was launched with a short book he wrote with Le Corbusier, Après le Cubisme (1918). They also expounded their ideas in another joint book, La Peinture moderne (1925), and in the journal L'Esprit nouveau, which they ran from 1920 to 1925. The journal attracted contributions from eminent artists and writers of various persuasions, but Purism was more important in theory than in practice and did not succeed in establishing a school of painting. Both protagonists seemed to realize that it represented something of a dead end pictorially and moved on to much looser styles. Its main sequel is to be found in the architectural theories and achievements of Le Corbusier and more generally in the field of design, where there is some kinship with the contemporary ideals of the Bauhaus. As George Heard Hamilton writes, ‘Purism did encourage a serious look at the products and the methods of producing objects in modern times … Whenever we admire the simple contour or refined shape of an article of daily use, we share in the Purist aesthetic.’ See also NEOCLASSICISM.