With the Purist Intentions

Artistic movements nearly always spring from a desire to throw out the old and bring in the new. That’s certainly true of Purism, a post-World War I, Paris-based movement that promoted an aesthetic of refinement and clarification.

The founders of Purism, artists Amedee Ozenfant and Charles-Edouard Jeanneret (better known by his pseudonym, Le Corbusier), titled their manifesto “Apres le cubism” (‘After Cubism”) and dismissed their Cubist predecessors’ work as outdated decoration. Then they laid down “the laws” of the new, up-to-date movement. What was needed, they wrote, was a rigorous, precise, pure art attuned to the science and industry that permeated modern life.

Ozenfant and Jeanneret were so dedicated to their ideal and collaborated so closely that “they” became “we,” Ozenfant later wrote. The movement ran its course in seven years, from 1918 to 1925, but Ozenfant’s zeal to make every aspect of his life conform to the tenets of Purism was so intense that he later referred to that phase of his career as his “period of vacuum-cleaning.”

“It’s the perfect metaphor for this sensibility,” says Carol Eliel, a curator of modern and contemporary art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. “The artists really were trying to pare down and peel off and get rid of the excess.” And their efforts weren’t confined to painting. “They made no distinction between art, architecture, design and urban planning. Everything existed in a totality,” she says.

The French magazine L’Esprit Nouveau (the New Spirit), published from 1920 to 1925, espoused the Purists’ philosophy. Eliel has adopted the title for “L’Esprit Nouveau: Purism in Paris, 1918-1925,” an exhibition that opens next Sunday at LACMA.

The show features 65 paintings and works on paper by Ozenfant, Jeanneret and their closest colleague, painter Fernand Leger. It also boasts an unusual architectural centerpiece: a full-scale, walk-in reconstruction of the main room of the Pavillon de l’Esprit Nouveau (Pavilion of the New Spirit) in Paris’ 1925 International Exposition of Decorative and Industrial Arts. The pavilion was designed by Le Corbusier, who adopted his pseudonym in 1920 and used it exclusively after 1923.

In terms of laying Cubism to rest, the Purists were notably unsuccessful. Today, Cubism is seen as a seminal movement of Modernism; Purism has settled into relative obscurity. Although well known to scholars as a manifestation of the rational impulse that followed Cubism, it has been overshadowed by the more provocative, irrational movements of Dada and Surrealism, which developed around the same time.

That made Purism fertile territory for Eliel, but the exhibition didn’t come from a desire to revive a moribund movement. Her initial inspiration was a painting in the museum’s permanent collection, Ozenfant’s “Still Life With Bottles.”

“It’s a wonderful Ozenfant, a fascinating picture,” Eliel says of the 1922 painting. Exemplifying Purist ideals, the predominantly blue and gray composition merges traditional still-life objects with architectural forms and references to modern industry. The overlapping cluster of bottles and drinking glasses can be read as architectural columns and smoke-stacks.

As much as Eliel liked the picture, she realized she knew little about its creator and the rest of his work. She began filling that gap-with the thought of developing an exhibition of his work-on a trip to Paris in 1995. She was working on a different show, but she visited the gallery that represents Ozenfant’s estate and began “poking around a bit,” she says. “What became quite clear was that the interesting years of his career were between 1918 and 1925, and that the evolution of his work during that period was intimately connected with Le Corbusier. They were working as closely together during those years as Picasso and Braque did when they were developing Cubism, so I decided to focus on Purism per se.”

She could have taken a broad view, by including works by many more artists, such as French painter Jean Helion, and by taking note of related movements, including American Precisionism and its leading practitioner, Charles Sheeler. Instead, Eliel decided to “take a narrow slice and look at it in depth, to give people something to really get their teeth into,” she says.

That left her with the three core Purists: Ozenfant (1886-1966), who is mainly known as a Purist painter and theorist; Le Corbusier (1887-1965), an enormously influential architect who painted throughout his career but mostly as a private activity; and Leger (1881-1955), who completed some of his best-known paintings-including “The Mechanic” and “Three Women (Le Grand dejeuner)’-during his Purist phase and continued to exemplify Purism’s so-called machine aesthetic on a monumental scale.

To assemble a compendium of their efforts, Eliel worked with the Le Corbusier Foundation in Paris and borrowed other pieces from museums and private collections in the U.S., France, Germany, Switzerland and Japan. In exhibitions such as this, “you sweat every loan,” she says, “but I have to say the lenders were very generous. People realized that this was an idea worth exploring.”

A crucial aspect of the exploration was to commission an English translation of “Apres le cubism’-the first ever, Eliel says-which is printed in the exhibition catalog. “One of the reasons that this movement has not gotten the critical and academic and curatorial attention that it might have in the English-speaking world is that these writings weren’t accessible in English,” she says. “Many people were just not aware of their existence.”

The document is couched as a series of commentaries on the status of art in 1918, not as a manifesto per se, but it clearly establishes the philosophical underpinnings of Purism. Drawing parallels between art and science, “After Cubism” states that “art must generalize to attain beauty.” The process of producing “a great constructive art” begins “with an analytic choice, necessarily of materials chosen by our human senses” and entails “studying the present universe” to “rise above gross and fleeting contingencies and express a law.” The law the writers had in mind was one “that causes the highest spiritual delectation.”

Though many paintings in the exhibition embody this aesthetic, the most complete picture is in the reconstruction of the Pavillon de l’Esprit Nouveau. Conceived for the 1925 exposition, which was intended to be a cutting-edge showcase for decorative and industrial arts, the pavilion turned out to be one of the few adventurous elements in a very conservative enterprise.

Le Corbusier designed the pavilion as the basic module for his utopian cities. Furnished with Purist paintings and mass-produced household items, it was intended to make avant-garde art and architecture available to the masses. But by the time the pavilion opened, Le Corbusier and his colleagues were moving on as individuals. Both praised and reviled, the pavilion marked the end of Purism as a coherent, collaborative movement. Eliel has been interested in architecture and design throughout her career, but this is her first show with a strong architectural component. She decided that for what amounts to a debut, the usual drawings and models wouldn’t suffice. At LACMA, visitors can walk into the pavilion and see it from the inside.

‘I thought the only way to really understand that space was to be in that space,” Eliel says. “Luckily, the building was relatively small, and this one main room was doable within the confines of our gallery.” She worked with architectural historian Arthur Regg to re-create Le Corbusier’s plans for the room. The museum commissioned Los Angeles-based artist and model builder Roy Thurston to construct it.

Located in the middle of the show, on the plaza level of the Anderson building, the pavilion is a rectangular room of a fully outfitted model home-conceived as a work of functional art. A section of a loft cuts across one end of the clean-lined, classically modern space. The walls are painted white, deep umber and various shades of gray; the ceiling of the loft is blue.

The room is equipped with simple, built-in cabinets and store-bought furniture, including a leather-upholstered easy chair. A slim, modular table attached to one wall is accompanied by bent-wood armchairs with cane seats.

The 1925 pavilion was destroyed at the end of the exposition, but the replication is as close as possible to the real thing. One thing that particularly pleases Eliel is that the museum was able to borrow the four paintings-one each by the three leading Purists and one by Spanish artist Juan Gris-shown in the original structure. Also on display is Jacques Lipchitz’s small bronze relief, “Figure With Guitar,” which stands on a bank of cabinets.

Organizing the show was immensely satisfying, Eliel says, because it allowed her to pursue various personal and professional interests while producing a fresh view of a largely forgotten period. What’s more, she says, her research has given her lots of ideas for her next big project.

“There was so much going on simultaneously in Europe in the post-World War I era, and much of it seems so contradictory,” she says. “You have Dada and Surrealism and Purism happening at the same time. And every country you look at has something different that may be in alliance with something else or in contradiction to it. The 1920s is a fascinating decade, and it’s not one that has been mined very well by museums. There was great stuff being made then; this show is just the tip of the iceberg.”

*

* “L’Esprit Nouveau: Purism in Paris, 1918-1925,” Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd. Next Sunday through Aug. 5. Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, noon-8 p.m.; Saturdays-Sundays, 11 a.m.-8 p.m. Adults, $7; seniors and students, $5; children younger than 5, $1. (323) 857-6000.