Amédée Ozenfant

Amédée Ozenfant (15 April 1886 – 4 May 1966) was a French cubist painter and writer. Together with Charles-Edouard Jeanneret (later known as Le Corbusier) he founded the Purist movement.

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.

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