L'Esprit Nouveau
dal 30/4/2001 al 5/8/2001
Segnalato da
30/4/2001
L'Esprit Nouveau
County Museum of Art, Los Angeles
LACMA revisits the origins of the Modernist movement, which 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.
LACMA revisits the origins of the Modernist movement, which 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.
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 the 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 came 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 postwar French 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 entitled 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.
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Los Angeles, CA, USA