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Purism

Purism, referring to the arts, was a movement that took place between 1918 and 1925 that influenced French painting and architecture. Purism was led by Amédée Ozenfant and Charles Edouard Jeanneret (Le Corbusier). Ozenfant and Le Corbusier formulated an aesthetic doctrine born from a criticism of Cubism and called it Purism: where objects are represented as elementary forms devoid of detail. The main concepts were presented in their short essay Après le Cubisme (After Cubism) published in 1918.[1][2]

For the 19th-century art movement, see Purismo.

Purism does not intend to be a scientific art, which it is in no sense.

Cubism has become a decorative art of romantic ornamentism.

There is a hierarchy in the arts: decorative art is at the base, the human figure at the summit.

Painting is as good as the intrinsic qualities of its plastic elements, not their representative or narrative possibilities.

Purism wants to conceive clearly, execute loyally, exactly without deceits; it abandons troubled conceptions, summary or bristling executions. A serious art must banish all techniques not faithful to the real value of the conception.

Art consists in the conception before anything else.

Technique is only a tool, humbly at the service of the conception.

Purism fears the bizarre and the original. It seeks the pure element in order to reconstruct organized paintings that seem to be facts from nature herself.

The method must be sure enough not to hinder the conception.

Purism does not believe that returning to nature signifies the copying of nature.

It admits all deformation is justified by the search for the invariant.

All liberties are accepted in art except those that are unclear.

[1]

The Purist Manifesto lays out the rules Ozenfant and Le Corbusier created to govern the Purist movement.[1]

Crystal Cubism

Section d'Or

Orphism

De Stijl

Tubism

Raoul Albert La Roche

. Gallica, Bibliothèque nationale de France

Le Purisme, L'Esprit nouveau: revue internationale d'esthétique, 1920

Purisme, Agence photographique de la réunion des Musées nationaux