Background
Amedee Ozenfant was born on April 15, 1886 in Saint-Quentin, Aisne, France, into a bourgeois family.
He studied painting under Jacques-Emile Blanche at the Académie de la Palette, where he became a friend of Roger de La Fresnaye and André Dunoyer de Segonzac.
Amedee Ozenfant was born on April 15, 1886 in Saint-Quentin, Aisne, France, into a bourgeois family.
At the age of fourteen Ozenfant began painting, and in 1904 he attended a drawing course run by Jules-Alexandre Patrouillard Degrave at the Ecole Municipale de Dessin Quentin de La Tour in Saint-Quentin.
The following year he moved to Paris, where he entered an architecture studio. By 1907 he studied painting with Maurice Pillard Verneuil and Charles Cottet, later under Jacques-Emile Blanche at the Académie de la Palette, where he became a friend of Roger de La Fresnaye and André Dunoyer de Segonzac.
Later he attended lectures at the Collège de France in Paris, France.
Amedee Ozenfant began exhibiting at the Salon de la Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1908, and two years later began exhibiting at the Salon d'Automne.
Between 1909 and 1913 he travelled to Russia, Italy, Belgium, and the Netherlands. 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, who was later known as 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.
Ozenfant exhibited in the second Purist exhibition which was held at the Galerie Druet, Paris, in 1921. In 1924 he opened a free studio in Paris together 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 work he fully expounds his theory of Purism, and it is remarkable for its idiosyncratic and aphoristic style.
Amedee Ozenfant later founded his own atelier "l’Académie Ozenfant" in the residence and studio that Le Corbusier had designed for him. He taught at the Académie Moderne in 1929 and established his own art school, named the Ozenfant Academy of Fine Arts, in Paris in 1932. In 1935 he moved to London, where he set up the Ozenfant Academy of Fine Arts in May of that year, before moving to New York some three years later. From 1935 to 1938 he also taught at the French Institute in London. His students in London included Leonora Carrington, Sari Dienes, Stella Snead and Hamed Saeed. Students in New York included the Canadian Madeleine Laliberté.
By the time he was in England, Ozenfant had refined his ideas about colour and outlined many of these in the six articles on the subject that he wrote for the Architectural Review.
The Ozenfant School of Fine Arts in New York was in operation from 1939 until 1955. Amedee Ozenfant became a US citizen in 1944. He 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 on May 4, 1966 in Cannes, France.
By the time he was in England, Ozenfant had refined his ideas about colour. Colour was now regarded as an essential element of architecture, rather than something considered by the architect while his work was being erected. Ozenfant believed that colour always modifies the form of the building and should receive more careful attention.
Quotations:
"We must endeavour to introduce a little order into this business, or at least sense into a great deal of it. But what is sense without order? We must try to find some method of arriving at some sort of order - one that will at least enable us to escape from this vagueness in the design of colour."
"I believe that an immense service would be done to architects, decorators, house-painters etc., if a chart especially adapted to their particular requirements were established. This chart might contain about a hundred hues."
"Simplification, distortion of forms, and modifications of natural appearances, are ways of arriving at intense expressiveness of form."
He was married to Zinaida Fedorovna (Klingberg) Ozenfant, but the couple divorced.