OZENFANT, AMDE

born April 15, 1886, Saint-Quentin, France died May 4, 1966, Cannes French painter and art theoretician who cofounded the 20th-century art movement known as Purism. Ozenfant studied art in his hometown and in 1906 went to Paris to study painting and architecture at the Acadmie de La Palette, where he was influenced by pointillism. He became enamoured of Cubism, and in 1915 he founded with Max Jacob and Guillaume Apollinaire the review L'lan, in which they touted the movement's principles. By 1917, Ozenfant had become disillusioned with Cubism, feeling that it had sacrificed its original purity and rigour and become a mere decorative vehicle. He became associated with Le Corbusier, and within a year they formulated and published the manifesto of what they called Purism in Aprs le Cubism (1918; After Cubism). In 1919 they founded the avant-garde review L'Esprit Nouveau, in which they explored the sources and directions of contemporary art. Ozenfant's definitive work on this subject, the two-volume L'Art (The Foundations of Modern Art) was published in 1928. From 1931 to 1938 he worked on a massive figural composition done in the Purist style and entitled Life. Ozenfant moved to London in 1935 and founded the Ozenfant School of Fine Arts, which he moved to New York in 1938. He returned to France in 1955. As a theoretician Ozenfant advanced the principles of order, rationality, and precision and called for a new classicism based upon the aesthetic of modern technology. His own painting stressed clarity, serenity, and economy of means; in his still lifes the objects are reduced to flat planes of colour existing in a rigid architectonic framework.