Purism, referring to the arts, was a movement that took place between 1918 and 1925 that influenced French painting and architecture. Purism was led by Amédée Ozenfant and Charles Edouard Jeanneret (Le Corbusier). Ozenfant and Le Corbusier created a variation of the Cubist movement and called it Purism: where objects are represented as elementary forms devoid of detail. The main concepts were presented in their book Après le Cubisme (After Cubism) published in 1918.

Origin
The pamphlet Apres le Cubisme (After Cubism ) of 1918, which is also considered a manifesto of purism, marks its beginning. In Apres le Cubisme Le Corbusier and Ozenfant criticize current trends of synthetic and Orphic Cubism than decorative and ornamental. A revised manifesto of purism appeared in 1921 under the title “purism” in the magazine L’Esprit Nouveau.

Properties of Purism
The purist painting is characterized by the following characteristics:

strict, clear forms
simple everyday objects as central motifs
limited repertoire of image subjects such. Eg bottles, laboratory glasses, wine glasses or a guitar
Call for a restriction of the color selection to earth colors, ocher yellow, red, white, black, and ultramarine blue, refusal of dynamic colors such as lemon yellow, orange, bright cobalt blue, madder or emerald green
For the purists, still life is the main motive of their pictures. The goal is the unveiling of the geometric structure of nature by the painter.

The purists also showed a great interest in machines and their aesthetics. The artist should learn his lesson of machines and apply the principle of machine repetition in art production. On a rational basis, simple geometric shapes should be used with machine precision. The purists appreciated the Golden Ratio as an ideal proportion. They rejected purely decorative elements. Le Corbusier was also the “Modulor”, a proportion based on the golden section Proportionslehre patent.

Post World War I
Le Corbusier and Ozenfant were the creators of Purism. Fernand Léger was a principle associate. Purism was an attempt to restore regularity in a war-torn France post World War I. Unlike what they saw as ‘decorative’ fragmentation of objects in Cubism, Purism proposed a style of painting where elements were represented as robust simplified forms with minimal detail, while embracing technology and the machine.

Purism culminated in Le Corbusier’s Pavillon de l’Esprit Nouveau (Pavilion of the New Spirit), constructed for the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts in 1925. This included the work of Cubists Juan Gris and Jacques Lipchitz. Following this exhibition the relationship between Le Corbusier and Ozenfant declined.

Influences
The Czech architect Bedřich Feuerstein was influenced by purism. Also the Russian avant-garde painter Ivan Kliun in the 30s towards the end of his career.

L’Esprit Nouveau
Ozenfant and Le Corbusier contributed extensively to an art magazine called L’Esprit Nouveau from 1920 to 1925 serving as a platform for propaganda towards their Purist movement.

Purist Manifesto
The Purist Manifesto lays out the rules Ozenfant and Le Corbusier created to govern the Purist movement.

Purism does not intend to be a scientific art, which it is in no sense.
Cubism has become a decorative art of romantic ornamentism.
There is a hierarchy in the arts: decorative art is at the base, the human figure at the summit.
Painting is as good as the intrinsic qualities of its plastic elements, not their representative or narrative possibilities.
Purism wants to conceive clearly, execute loyally, exactly without deceits; it abandons troubled conceptions, summary or bristling executions. A serious art must banish all techniques not faithful to the real value of the conception.
Art consists in the conception before anything else.
Technique is only a tool, humbly at the service of the conception.
Purism fears the bizarre and the original. It seeks the pure element in order to reconstruct organized paintings that seem to be facts from nature herself.
The method must be sure enough not to hinder the conception.
Purism does not believe that returning to nature signifies the copying of nature.
It admits all deformation is justified by the search for the invariant.
All liberties are accepted in art except those that are unclear.

Painter of Purism
The style of purism was a small current whose main representatives were Le Corbusier and Ozenfant. In addition, there were a number of painters who were close to or influenced by purism:

Marcelle Cahn
Otto Carlsund
Franciska Clausen
Florence Henri
Fernand Léger
Exhibitions and Publications
The first purist exhibition of paintings by Ozenfant and Le Corbusier took place in December 1918 at Galerie Thomas. The second exhibition followed January 1921 in the gallery Druet.

The best-known exhibited work of purism was Le Corbusier’s Pavillon de l’Esprit Nouveau in 1925 for the Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs. The architecture of the pavilion, its interior design, the paintings, sculptures, furniture and decorative objects illustrated the aesthetics of purism.

The main speech tube of purism was the magazine L’Esprit Nouveau, founded by Ozenfant and Le Corbusier in 1919, with which they tried to disseminate their idea of the new art movement.

Criticism
Specially criticism has been made of Le Corbusier’s view of architecture and urban planning. So from today’s perspective, it is no longer understandable that he called for demolishing the inner cities of most European cities and replace them with a rational, geometric and symmetrical urban planning. In his plan for Paris in “The Radiant City” he suggested about to demolish the entire right bank of the Seine from Boulevard Haussmann to the Louvre and replaced by apartment blocks, with huge roads in between.

End of purism and influence on later painting
The purism in the narrower sense ended in 1925, when Le Corbusier and Ozenfant ended their collaboration. Purism in the broader sense, however, can not be talked about until 1930, when Le Corbusier and Ozenfant turned exclusively to other themes and styles.

Although the purism finally ended in 1930 as a style, he also exercised his influence on later art movements, such. For example, the painters of the Pop Art of the 1960s, who drew their inspiration as the purists from mass-produced everyday objects. The machine aesthetics of the purists also influenced the architecture, especially that of Le Corbusier, as well as commercial and applied art.

Source from Wikipedia