LOS ANGELES, NOVEMBER 2000

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art-LACMA-revisits the origins of the Modernist movement that made a lasting change in art and architecture with a pioneering exhibition, L'Esprit Nouveau: Purism in Paris, 1918-1925. As World War I came to a close and the machine age saturated daily lives the world over, three artists formed the core of an art movement that both championed the new and reflected the classical. Purism in Paris, organized by LACMA, examines the art and writings of Amédée Ozenfant, Charles-Edouard Jeanneret (better known by his pseudonym, Le Corbusier), and Fernand Léger. Purism in Paris includes rarely exhibited paintings and drawings, as well as a full-scale reconstruction of the interior of Le Corbusier's Pavillon de l'Esprit Nouveau (Pavilion of the New Spirit) built in 1925 for the International Exposition of Decorative and Industrial Arts in Paris. Opening April 29, Purism in Paris remains on view through August 5, 2001.

The basis of the Purist movement is the work made between 1918 and 1925 by Purism's founders and leading proponents, Ozenfant and Jeanneret (Le Corbusier), and the work of 1920-25 by their closest colleague, Fernand Léger. Purism evolved as a response to both the artistic and historic conditions in post-World War I Paris. Realized particularly in painting and architecture, Purism championed a traditional classicism with a formal focus on clean geometries, yet it simultaneously embraced new technologies, new materials, and the machine aesthetic.

By 1917, both the Swiss-born Jeanneret and Ozenfant-who hailed from the French provinces-were living in Paris. Ozenfant encouraged Jeanneret to paint (in addition to working on his architectural projects), and in late 1918 they had a two-person exhibition in Paris. The imagery of the works exhibited was pared down and based on geometric forms (the cylinder, the sphere, the cube); the paintings depicted landscapes in addition to the still lifes that would ultimately define Purist subject matter. More important than the exhibition, however, was the publication that immediately preceded it. Après le cubisme (After Cubism), written by Ozenfant and Jeanneret, claimed simply to be a series of commentaries defining the current condition of art, but it is in fact a manifesto for French postwar painting. It includes a brief but powerful articulation of the relationship between art and science, both of which strive to put the universe in balance. The chapter of Après le cubisme titled "The Laws" establishes the philosophical underpinnings of Purism. "Great art [has] the ideal of generalizing, which is the highest goal of the spirit.... [It] scorn[s] chance... art must generalize to attain beauty."

Purist ideals are well represented in Purism in Paris. In Jeanneret's Still Life of 1920, the sound hole of the guitar doubles as the top of a pile of plates, which reads like a column. The curved form in the center of the foreground, echoing the curves of the guitar, appears to be a loose piece of architectural molding. In the middle of the composition a small fluted glass takes on the appearance of a Doric column; at the same time, surrounded by two long-stemmed pipes, this central glass/column resembles the gears or other internal parts of some modern machinery. Sill Life with Bottles, painted by Ozenfant in 1922, similarly conflates a traditional still life subject with architectural references-both classical and contemporary-and with modern industrial references. The fluted bottle, flask, and glasses read like ancient Greek architecture, while the tall, thin bottlenecks look like the smokestacks of contemporary factories.

After a successful career in Cubist circles prior to the war, Léger's style began to convey Purist ideals beginning in 1920. The Mechanic (1920) reflects the growing influence of the Purists and their aesthetic, not only in its subject matter, but also in specific visual elements. Just above the mechanic's proper right shoulder is a broad smokestack such as those subsequently illustrated in the periodical L'Esprit nouveau, published by Ozenfant and Jeanneret; the thinner, taller cylinder behind is reminiscent of the pipe stems in the Purists' early still lifes. In general, the background details of The Mechanic-particularly the dashed black-and-white lines-suggest the mechanized activity of a factory assembly line. Over the next several years, Léger's work increasingly reflected his assimilation of the Purist aesthetic. His environments and figures became increasingly geometric, mechanical, and architectural.

Jeanneret, Ozenfant, and Léger all perceived parallels between the machine and the painted image; and just as Jeanneret recognized such parallels between the machine and architecture, Léger also perceived them between the machine and film, evidenced by his film Ballet mécanique (Mechanical Ballet), 1923-24. The film suggests that, like the Purists, Léger was striving to combine the contemporary and the timeless, in this case the energy of the machine and the elegance of classical ballet. The film will be screened continuously in Purism in Paris.

In 1925 the International Exposition of Decorative and Industrial Arts opened in the center of Paris. According to official documents announcing the fair in 1924, it was open to anyone "whose production presents... clearly modern tendencies. That is to say, any copying or counterfeiting of ancient styles is strictly forbidden." For the exposition, Le Corbusier designed the Pavillon de l'Esprit Nouveau (Pavilion of the New Spirit), an example of his desire to make high-quality, avant-garde architecture and design available to the masses. At the heart of LACMA's Purism in Paris exhibition is a full-scale reconstruction of the main room of the Pavillon de l'Esprit Nouveau, which exemplified Purist tenets. It was designed as the basic standardized module for Le Corbusier's utopian urban plans of the early 1920s, conceived to accommodate up to 3 million inhabitants. LACMA's reconstruction of the Pavillon de l'Esprit Nouveau includes the four paintings-by Jeanneret, Ozenfant, Léger, and Juan Gris-that hung in the original pavilion, as well as a bronze relief by Jacques Lipchitz and some of the original furnishings (tables, chairs, glassware, etc.).

The Pavillon de l'Esprit Nouveau is complemented in the exhibition by a selection of approximately 65 Purist paintings and works on paper by Jeanneret, Ozenfant, and Léger from public and private collections in the United States and abroad. These works make clear the Purists' simultaneous interests in the vocabulary of ancient Greek architecture and in contemporary machine and mechanical forms, as well as the very close relationship between Purist architecture and painting.

As might be expected, the Pavillon de l'Esprit Nouveau was praised by some and vilified by others. Its legacy, however, is indisputable, in the history of architecture as well as in the history of urbanism and urban planning. Ironically, then, it marked the end-in 1925-of the close collaboration between Ozenfant and Le Corbusier and of Purism as a coherent movement.

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Curator: Carol S. Eliel, curator, Modern and Contemporary Art department