(Saint-Quentin 1886 – 1966 Cannes)
Verreries dans un ovale - Nature morte puriste, 1925, signed and dated Ozenfant 25, pastel, gouache on paper, 28 x 22 cm, framed

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

Provenance:
Galerie Berri-Argenson, 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 criticized 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 “Verreries dans un ovale - Nature morte puriste” 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)