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L'Esprit Nouveau: Purism in Paris 1918-1925
by Carol Eliel.
Harry N. Abrams, New York, NY, U.S.A., 2001.
ISBN: 0-8109-6727-8.
Reviewed by Roy R. Behrens, 2022 X Avenue, Dysart, IA 52224-9767, U.S.A.
E-mail: ballast@netins.net
The title of this book ("the new spirit") is the same as that of a Paris-based art magazine that ran from 1920 to 1925. Founded by French painter Amedee Ozenfant and Swiss painter and architect Le Corbusier, it disseminated the ideas of Purism, a cleaned-up and machine-based brand of Cubism, to which the Purists gave credit for having restored "the ornamental esthetic." Geometric abstractionists and devout functionalists, the Purists denied any difference between "the esthetic of a carpet and that of a cubist painting." Their sometime associate was French painter Fernand Leger, who remembers when he first caught sight of Le Corbusier, on a bicycle in Montparnasse, "under a bowler hat, with the spectacles and overcoat of a clergyman." This is the catalog for an exhibition that premiered in April 2001 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. It offers three interesting essays about Purism in the context of post-war Paris, Ozenfant (who later wrote Foundations of Modern Art), and Le Corbusier's famous pavilion (filled with paintings by Leger) at the 1925 International Exposition of Decorative Arts in Paris, from which the term Art Deco came. It includes the first English translation of Ozenfant's and Le Corbusier's 1918 manifesto, After Cubism. Illustrated by historic photographs and more than seventy-five paintings, this is a full-color feast of the art of the Purists, who declare at the end of a chapter: "Enough of games. We aspire to a serious rigor."
(Reprinted by permission from Ballast Quarterly Review, Vol. 16, No. 4, Summer 2001.)
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