Purism

This article is about an art style. There is also another meaning for purism, namely linguistic purism.

For the Spanish architecture style, see Purism (architecture)

Purism was a form of Cubism advocated by the French painter Amédée Ozenfant and the architect Charles-Edouard Jeanneret (Le Corbusier). Purism rejected the decorative trend of cubism and advocated a return to clear, ordered forms that were expressive of the modern machine age as documented in their 1918 book After Cubism.

Creation

The two artists, Jeanneret and Ozenfant, strongly objected to developments in Cubist art, particularly the decorative elements. Ozenfant and Le Corbusier wanted a return to more basic forms mainly inspired by modern machinery. To them, the golden ratio was the ideal shape, and that is reflected in their work. The theory of Purism is expounded in the book La peinture moderne, (Paris, 1925), co-written by Ozenfant and Le Corbusier and subsequently published in English as The Foundations of Modern Art.

Purist works are notable in their explicit use of geometric form and large areas of pure colour, and for their cool and detached paint surfaces - both of which prefigure the move towards the 'Hard Edge' style in American painting, with its similar emphasis on absolute definition of form.

Le Corbusier's interest in mechanation and pure proportion persisted into his later architectural endeavours, and the Purist aesthetic as a whole can be seen to have had particular influence on the evolution of modern architecture. The Czech architect and painter Bedřich Feuerstein was also influenced by Purism, as were the Eesti Kunstnike Rühm (Group of Estonian Artists) in Tallinn, whose main members were Arnold Akberg, Mart Laarman, Henrik Olvi, and Juhan Raudsepp. Their journal, "Uue Kunsti Raamat", or "Book of New Art", which appeared in 1928, was strongly influenced by L'Esprit Nouveau and by French Purism's appeal to reason and order. Fernand Leger also is seen to have been influenced by purism, though his style is quite different to that of Jeanneret or Ozenfant.