Lot 283 D

Entirely in keeping with the spirit of that period, the young Amédée Ozenfant attentively followed the Cubist tendencies of the French avant-garde in early 20th-century Paris. Ozenfant had diverse interests and, in addition to his well-known work as a visual artist, he also published a number of important texts, including “Après le cubisme”, which he composed together with Charles-Edouard Jeanneret (Le Corbusier) in 1918.
Cubism was the precondition for the artistic approach of Ozenfant and Le Corbusier but, from then on, it served to establish a distinction. Using the term “Purism”, they formulated the artistic programme of a new avant-garde, which turned away from the developments of Cubism in order to propagate the principles of a more rational aesthetic order: a concept of simplification and a clear planimetric disposition which relates the geometries of the object and of surfaces to one another. However the collaboration between the two artists came to an end in 1925, at the latest: they had developed in different directions. Ozenfant was now emphasising visual art's independence relative to architecture and all functional frameworks. In particular, he saw it as removed from mechanical or industrial contexts.
In visual art the ideas of Purism were carried out primarily in the form of still lifes, and Amédée Ozenfant's focus on this subject is thus logical. Our work strikingly demonstrates how the artist compositionally realised the propagated clarification of the pictorial space. In a nuanced dialogue between surface and space, this still life featuring traditional pictorial elements like the bottle, guitar and cup arrives at a finely balanced equilibrium. As cool as Ozenfant's compositional principles may sometimes seem, the lively, meditatively poetic aspect of this work's drawing is nonetheless particularly impressive.