Purism

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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.

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 Amédée 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 campaign for the reconstitution of a healthy art’, aiming 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 in their book Après le Cubisme (1918) and other writings. However, they seemed to realize that it represented something of a dead end pictorially and moved on to much looser styles. The movement's main sequel is to be found in Le Corbusier's architectural work and theories 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 (Painting and Sculpture in Europe: 1880–1940, 1967), ‘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.’

PURISM. Scrupulous observance of, or insistence on, purity or correctness in LANGUAGE and STYLE, an attitude often considered by others as excessive. Purists may have specific plans for reforming languages in such areas as spelling, vocabulary, and grammar. One of the earliest English treatises on logic, Ralph Lever's The Arte of Reason, Rightly Termed Witcraft (1573), rejected Latinate terms in favour of a native technical vocabulary: in addition to witcraft, he coined among other terms foreset subject, backset predicate, and gainset opposite. In the 19c, the philologist William Barnes wrote an English grammar, the Outline of English Speech-Craft (1878), using invented vocabulary such as thought-wording proposition, speech-thing subject, and timetaking predicate. Some words did catch on: the rhetorician John Earle (1890) credited the 19c movement with popularizing openmindedness, seamy, shaky, and unknowable.

In present-day terms, purists are reformers who seek to root out presumed errors in grammar and usage and offer what they feel to be more correct alternatives. They usually object to the state of the language and/or the direction in which it appears to be going, suspect and disapprove of new words or of old words with new meanings, insist on the literal meaning of words, and insist on logic in usage. In addition, they tend to see themselves individually as acting on behalf of an unclear ultimate authority. There are few self-confessed purists among the critics of the English language today; purism is generally a negative term, and by and large purists are regarded as hypercorrective extremists. It is not unusual, however, to find grammar and usage critics denying that they are purists while engaging in all the traditional forms of purism. See PLAIN, PURE.

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 Amédée 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 campaign for the reconstitution of a healthy art’, aiming 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—in their book Après le Cubisme (1918) and other writings. However, they seemed to realize that it represented something of a dead end pictorially and moved on to much looser styles. The movement's main sequel is to be found in Le Corbusier's architectural work and theories and more generally in the field of design, where there is some kinship with the contemporary ideals of the Bauhaus.

Purism. French artistic movement of c.1918–25 linked to the Machine Aesthetic and founded by Ozenfant and Le Corbusier. It claimed Cubism was becoming concerned with mere decoration, that art needed to reflect the ‘spirit of the age’, exclude emotionalism and expression, and learn lessons inherent in the precision of machinery. Advocated in Après le Cubisme (1918), L'Esprit Nouveau (1920–5), and La Peinture Moderne (1925), it influenced the architectural theories of Constructivism and the teachings of the Bauhaus.

Bibliography

Chilvers Osborne & Farr (eds.) (1988);
Jane Turner (1996)

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