The exhibition "Purist Perspectives", presented by Galerie Raphael Durazzo from May 9 to June 17, 2023, seeks to highlight the influence of the Purist movement on contemporary creation.
By drawing parallels between the greatest masters of the Purist movement, such as Amédée Ozenfant, Le Corbusier, Fernand Léger, and Serge Charchoune, and established artists of our time, the exhibition aims to shed light on the links between this movement and contemporary art, which, although developed over a single decade, continues to influence today’s artists more than a century later.
"The value of a painting derives from the intrinsic quality of its plastic elements and not from their narrative or representational potential" — Ozenfant & Le Corbusier in Après le Cubisme, 1918.
As early as 1916, Amédée Ozenfant had already begun a critique of Cubism, which he considered insufficiently concerned with modernity, in the journal L’Elan that he created with Max Jacob: "Cubism has already partially achieved its purist aim of cleansing the plastic language of parasitic terms," he said, though he believed it remained incomplete; "Cubism is a movement of Purism" that must be taken further.
Edouard Jeanneret, who would later be known as Le Corbusier, studied at the Werkbund, the German art school that pioneered the Machine Aesthetic and the idea of the total artwork (Gesamtkunstwerk).
Together, they sought to break away from what they saw as the excessive complexity of Cubist painting. In 1918, they wrote a manifesto-book: Après le Cubisme, which advocated for the rise of a purified and modern aesthetic, claiming to follow in the footsteps of Cézanne, who said, "everything is spheres and cylinders."
In 1920, they published L’Esprit Nouveau, joined by many other great artists including the Russian Serge Charchoune, who, after seeing Ozenfant’s first Purist work, said he "did not come out of it in one piece."
Juan Gris, Fernand Léger, Serge Charchoune, and many others would contribute regularly to the publication until it ceased in 1925. That same year was also the year of the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, where Le Corbusier built his Esprit Nouveau pavilion, in which works by himself, Ozenfant, Léger, as well as Juan Gris and Lipschitz were exhibited.
The Purists considered their art both modern and classical; classical in their dedication to rationality and order—their paintings used the mathematical proportions employed in the construction of ancient monuments; modern in their commitment to science and the machine aesthetic—in this, they distanced themselves from the interwar classicism, believing that the machine represented the true ideal of antiquity.
The first Purist compositions focused solely on the relationship between geometric forms and subdued, aged colors that highlighted them: circles, cylinders, and rectangles were used to create a pure and sincere emotion in the viewer, within a society undergoing standardization. Purist still lifes did not aim to capture every nuance of an object’s representation but rather depicted archetypal objects from daily life, stripped of any ornamentation.
Fernand Léger and his studio
Contemporary artists often cite Fernand Léger among their most decisive influences, and yet one often fails to trace this influence back to the movement itself, which greatly impacted the artist, even if he never fully aligned himself with it. One might even say that it is perhaps thanks to him that its influence has endured. Léger, along with Ozenfant and Le Corbusier, criticized Braque and Picasso for failing to reflect modern reality. However, he distinguished himself from the founders of the movement by using vivid colors, incorporating the human figure alongside manufactured objects, and turning toward abstraction—particularly mural abstraction—with the large fresco exhibited in the Esprit Nouveaupavilion in 1925, after which came major commissions that have since become iconic, such as the one adorning the United Nations headquarters.
In 1924, Fernand Léger created a studio-school that attracted talent from all over Europe; some of the 20th century’s most important artists trained there, including many women: Louise Bourgeois, Marcelle Cahn, Florence Henri, Nadia Khodossievitch (Nadia Léger), Nicolas de Staël, and Tarsila do Amaral.
Other artists were, of course, greatly influenced by Fernand Léger—for example, the unmistakable style of Magritte echoes that of Léger’s Purist period, whom he met in 1925 through Victor Servranckx.
Through Magritte and Léger, the codes of Purism have been passed down to the present day, and we now see a new generation of artists emerging, whose paintings display a multitude of characters and forms cut into geometric shapes that seem to interlock on the canvas—much like the gears of a machine or architectural elements.
