Amédée Ozenfant
Nature morte au pichet et à la guitare
1921
Pastel chalks, gouache and pencil on thin laid paper 42.3 x 30.3 cm (depiction 40.3 x 29.3 cm) Framed under glass. Signed and dated 'ozefant 1921' in white lower left. - In very fine condition. The sheet somewhat unevenly cut on the left, the upper margin slightly wavy.
From 1907, while Amédée Ozenfant was still a student in Paris, his artistic interests already encompassed not just the media of drawing and painting: he was also interested in architecture. In his early years he was first drawn irresistibly into the current of French Cubism; after the First World War he emancipated himself from it with the text “Après le cubisme” (1918), which he wrote with Charles-Edouard Jeanneret (Le Corbusier). He had met Le Corbusier in 1917 and, engaged in an intense artistic dialogue, the two of them developed a programmatic collaboration with a new orientation, which also found expression in the journal “L'Esprit Nouveau” (ed. by Michel Seuphor et al.) between 1920 and 1925. Ozenfant and Le Corbusier advised Raoul La Roche, whom they initially assisted in building up his unique collection in this period.
They used the term “Purism” to tie together the efforts of a new avant-garde turning away from the developments of Cubism and propagating the principles of a new rational order in the field of art: a concept involving a new simplification and clear planimetric disposition, which related the geometry of the object to that of surfaces. The new style found its structural models in the disciplines of architecture and modern technology. It demonstratively concentrated on a single subject: the still life. Ozenfant and Le Corbusier parted ways in 1925. After only a few years they had developed in different directions conceptually. Ozenfant's interest in the definition of the arts remained unbroken; however, he had begun to emphasise the independence of visual art relative to architecture and all functional frameworks. In particular, he saw it as detached from mechanised, industrial contexts. Within Germany, his collaboration with the architect Erich Mendelsohn on the interior of his Berlin villa Am Rupenhorn is to be emphasised.
Certificate
With a photo-certificate from Pierre Guénégan, Paris, dated 12 October 2016; the work will be included in the forthcoming supplement volume of the catalogue raisonné of the works on paper by Amédée Ozenfant, compiled by Pierre Guénégan, Paris.
Provenance
Galerie Percier, Paris (1927); Galerie Berri-Raspail, Paris; formerly Collection Edwin Livengood; Private collection, Europe