Amédée Ozenfant

Amédée Ozenfant studied at Académie de La Palette. Training under Charles Cottet and Jacques-Émile Blanche is recorded. Jean Simian is recorded as having studied under Amédée Ozenfant. The recorded working language is French and English. Employment is recorded with Ozenfant School of Fine Arts, Académie Ozenfant and Black Mountain College. Work by Amédée Ozenfant is recorded in the collections of Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Modern Art, Tate and National Gallery of Victoria. Distinctions recorded are Knight of the Legion of Honour and Officer of the Legion of Honour.

Ozenfant was born into a bourgeois family in Saint-Quentin, Aisne and was educated at Dominican colleges in Saint-Sébastien. After completing his education he returned to Saint-Quentin and began painting in watercolour and pastels. In 1904 he attended a drawing course run by Jules-Alexandre Patrouillard Degrave at the Ecole Municipale de Dessin Quentin Delatour in Saint-Quentin. In 1905 he began training in decorative arts in Paris, where his teachers were Maurice Pillard Verneuil and later Charles Cottet. By 1907 he had enrolled in the Académie de La Palette, where he studied under Jacques-Emile Blanche. He befriended Roger de La Fresnaye and André Dunoyer de Segonzac, who were his fellow students. In 1908 he began exhibiting at the Salon de la Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, and two years later began exhibiting at the Salon d'Automne.

Between 1909 and 1913 he travelled to Russia, Italy, Belgium, and the Netherlands and attended lectures at the Collège de France in Paris. In 1915, in collaboration with Max Jacob and Guillaume Apollinaire, Ozenfant founded the magazine L'Elan, which he edited until 1916, and his theories of Purism began to develop. He met the Swiss architect and painter Charles-Edouard Jeanneret (Le Corbusier) in 1917, and they jointly expounded the doctrines of Purism in their book Après le cubisme. Its publication coincided with the first Purist exhibition, held at the Galerie Thomas in Paris in 1917, in which Ozenfant exhibited. There was a further collaboration between them on the journal L'Esprit Nouveau, which was published from 1920 to 1925. A second Purist exhibition was held at the Galerie Druet, Paris, in 1921 in which Ozenfant again exhibited. In 1924 he opened Académie Moderne, a free studio in Paris with Fernand Léger, where they both taught with Aleksandra Ekster and Marie Laurencin. Ozenfant and Le Corbusier wrote La Peinture moderne in 1925 and in 1928 Ozenfant published Art, which was subsequently published in English as The Foundations of Modern Art in 1931. In this he fully expounds his theory of Purism, and it is remarkable for its idiosyncratic and aphoristic style.

The Ozenfant School of Fine Arts in New York was in operation from 1939 until 1955. He became a US citizen in 1944. Ozenfant taught and lectured widely in the United States until 1955, when he returned to France, where he was renaturalized in 1953. He remained there for the rest of his life and died in Cannes in 1966.

The Guggenheim Museum (New York City), the Hermitage Museum, the Honolulu Museum of Art, Kunstmuseum Basel (Switzerland), the Louvre, the Museum of Modern Art (New York City), Muzeum Sztuki (Lodz, Poland), the National Gallery of Australia (Canberra), the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Gallery (London) and the Walker Art Center (Minnesota) are among the public collections holding works by Amédée Ozenfant.

References Sources William W. Braham. Modern Color / Modern Architecture. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002. Cowling, Elizabeth; Mundy, Jennifer (1990). On Classic Ground: Picasso, Léger, de Chirico and the New Classicism 1910-1930. London: Tate Gallery. ISBN 1-854-37043-X Judi Freeman. "Ozenfant, Amédée." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press. Retrieved 26 November 2012. Los Angeles county museum of art, Carol S. Eliel, Françoise Ducros, Tag Gronberg, Amédée Ozenfant, and Charles-Edouard Jeanneret. 2001. L'esprit nouveau [exhibition, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, April 29-August 5, 2001]: purism in Paris, 1918-1925. New York: Harry N. Abrams. ISBN 0-8109-6727-8 Floyd Ratcliff. Paul Signac and Color in Neo-Impressionism, including the first English edition of From Eugène Delacroix to Neo-Impressionism (New York: Rockefeller University Press, 1992)