Amédée Ozenfant

Its life and its work

Amédée Ozenfant is a French painter born the April 15th 1886 with Saint-Quentin, and died the May 3rd 1966 with Cannes. Young artist it supports his vocation near Charles Cottet and Jacques-Emile Blanche with the Academy the Pallet between 1907 and 1913 and follows a marked training of a certain romanticism or symbolism. Avid of culture, he admires Cézanne, Seurat, and especially Pierre Puvis de Chavannes particularly his Pauvre Fisherman . Influences which he will not assert any more after 1916 in his many writings on Article. He foresees the purism which he develops with Le Corbusier in 1918 in: After the cubism , Modern Painting and texts of the new Spirit and which wants to be the general grammar of the sensitivity of the modern man. He recommends a type-setting system governed by orthogonal diagrams, forms arranged on the plane, the drawing, the color, and invoices it strictly controlled making table " a machine to move ". He studies the Architecture, impassions himself for the Peinture and the Mécanique, redrawing the Hispano-Suiza great sport model 1911 as a Hispano-Alphonse XIII.

He founds in April 1915 the review the Dash which gathers artists like André Lhote, Marchand, André Dunoyer de Segonzac, max Jacob, Apollinaire…, supporting the effort of war while specifying that the Germans were not only cruel attackers.

He engages then in typographical research, cubo-futuristic and designs the “typometry” then the “psychotypie” which make it possible to make appear, by the form even letters, the rates/rhythms and silences of poetry.

Friend of the poet Paul Dermée and Le Corbusier, - the first house built by this architect, in 1924, is that of Amédée - it creates with them the review the New Spirit, thus taking part in the renewal as well of the architectural forms as pictorial. Near to Tristan Tzara, Fernand Leger, of the Dadaism, the Surrealism and the Bauhaus, it inflects its research as from 1925 and reintroduced the human figure. In 1936, it founds with London the Ozenfant Academy then creates in the United States where it is exiled of 1939 to 1955 with New York, the Ozenfant School off Fine Art where it will teach with Roy Lichtenstein and Gerald Murphy. Its works evolve/move of a stylized representation of objects of the daily newspaper to vast air landscapes - ocean of clouds or cities seen of the sky, such sound After the storm on Hudson . After excesses of the culture machinist, the Cave with the Bathers paints in 1931-1931, evokes its search of the origins in a vision of the lost golden age and precedes the studies for the Vie (Museum of Modern art of the town of Paris) large fresco which joins again with the inspiration of the great tradition opened by Pierre Puvis de Chavannes and which its research had put in withdrawal, while keeping the direction of the composition that it had defined in the time of purism. Its last fabrics are purified to the extreme and have a dimension méditatives

Some works in the museums

Bottle, pipe and books , 1918, oil on fabric, 73x60 cm, Museum of the fine arts of Grenoble.

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