(Saint-Quentin 1886 – 1966 Cannes)
Accords ou Fugues, 1922, signed and dated Ozenfant XXII, pastel, gouache on paper, 32 x 26 cm, framed

This work will be included in the supplément of the catalogue raisonné des oeuvres sur papier d’Amédée Ozenfant currently being compiled by Pierre Guénégan.

Provenance:
Galerie Bourdon, Paris
European Private Collection

Purism was a movement formed around 1918, which proposed a kind of work in which objects are represented as powerful basic forms without details.
The movement was founded by Edouard Jeanneret (better known as Le Corbusier) and Amédée Ozenfant. They set out the theory of Purism in their book Après le Cubisme (After Cubism) published in 1918. They criticised the fragmentation of the object in Cubism and the way in which Cubism had become, in their view, decorative by that time. Instead, they proposed a kind of work in which objects were represented as powerful basic forms stripped of detail. Fernand Léger was another key artist associated with Purism.
www.tate.org

In “Accords ou Fugues” by Amédée Ozenfant, one can see some of the Purists’ central pictorial motives constructed of basic forms that are typified and repeatable. It is also possible to see the fundamental and pioneering assumption that every object, every glass and every bottle has an inner, essential form – it is a type. Purism consists of this and, with its principle of the rational instead of the decorative, stands at the beginning of a new aesthetic that continued to be felt in Functionalism.
www.mumok.at