Amedée Ozenfant was once a considerable figure in art circles, a celebrity of a sort, in his own time. One of the books he wrote, Art, in French, and Foundations of Modern Art in its English translation, was widely read, immensely influential and used as a standard teaching text. Ozenfant himself was described by senior figures in the French art establishment as the person who “represented modern French painting in London”. On 3rd December, 1937, he became a pioneer of arts broadcasting when he took part in a BBC programme called Three Artists and a Bowl of Fruit in which, live from the Alexandra Palace, using ten apples, eleven oranges and a pineapple, he produced three pictures - a realist composition; a Cubist still life; and a “Purist” landscape in which he transformed the apples and oranges into rocks and the pineapple into a palm tree. His performance elicited very positive responses from the handful of people then in possession of televisions and viewing that night.
In his youth, Ozenfant was exceptionally close friends with Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, which may seem no great claim to fame, until you realise that Jeanneret is better known as Le Corbusier (a name that Ozenfant himself suggested.) The two men later fell out, but before they did they founded an artistic movement called Purism, collaborating in the writing of an essay, called “Le Purisme”, that set out what the movement aimed to be. The essay was published in 1920 in their own magazine, accompanied by a photograph of the two of them, standing together in the basket of a hot air balloon.
Strangely, despite his considerable fame in the years before the Second World War, as Charles Darwent finds when he begins to research Ozenfant and the Ozenfant Academy of Fine Arts, the school Ozenfant set up in Kensington in 1936 and ran until 1939, the artist seems to have largely disappeared from the consciousness of the art world in the post-war decades.
Darwent’s book is a delight, despite the fact that for a lot of the time he is wrestling with smoke. Ben Nicholson and Henry Moore both taught at Ozenfant’s school but the papers they left for posterity contain no trace of their time there. The papers of Julian Trevelyan, one of Ozenfant’s students at the academy, are equally silent on the subject of both Ozenfant and the school. Charlotte and Ronald Morris, the school’s generous backers (who I can’t help thinking of as a British John and Sunday Reed), “simply fade from view”, Darwent tells us, adding “nothing is known of their lives after 1939.”
One great friend of Ozenfant’s in London, Erno Goldfinger, the modernist architect who, according to David Kynaston’s Austerity Britain, made the lives of journalists at the Daily Worker miserable with his open plan design for their newsroom and insistence on very low toilets to ensure a “more complete…bowel evacuation” has not by any means faded from view. While he was not a student at the school, his wife (the heiress of the Crosse and Blackwell business) was, and it is one of her works made at the academy that is among the very few pieces of art that survives from the work created under the tutelage of Mr Ozenfant. Her strange, even compelling, picture can be seen at Goldfinger House, 2 Willow Road, Hampstead. It is drawn in 9H pencil, the drawing tool Ozenfant insisted on (because it eliminated spontaneity!), and it depicts two ears. Typical of Darwent’s amusing style is his comment on this drawing:
“Goldfinger’s ears… are rendered outlandishly large by her outsized paper [Ozenfant not only insisted on 9H pencils and hated sketchiness; he made students work on the most enormous sheets of paper available]. This, together with the fact that so much effort has been expended on a part of the human anatomy so commonly overlooked in art, makes them seem slightly mad.”
The drawing, along with photographs of other similar works by other students of the academy, (the originals have mostly either been lost or destroyed, although Anne Cobham Said’s extraordinary Jo’s Wild Wood, is in the collection of the Tate), are very arresting and oddly haunting. Surprisingly, if I knew nothing about Ozenfant, I would describe them as surrealist, which given Purism, the movement that Ozenfant co-founded, was in direct opposition to Surrealism, is peculiar to say the least. *1.
Perhaps even more surprising, the most famous student to study at the school, (famous as a visual artist that is - Dulcie Gray was also an alumnus but went on to be an actress rather than a painter), Leonora Carrington, went on to be most definitely a Surrealist. In later years, Carrington spoke about her time studying with Ozenfant at the academy. Among her comments is the highest recommendation a teacher can be given, I think:
“He never left you disheartened.”
Although Carrington (and possibly Francis Bacon) are the only former students of the school to have gone on to become household names, the story Darwent tells of the academy is extremely diverting. Photographs reproduced in the book show its youthful students gathered in front of the building or working inside, in the studio, an enormous curtain stretched in the background, behind which Ozenfant laboured (in my view slightly ludicrously) on his vast obsessional canvas VIE. Looking at them, I sense enthusiasm and cheerfulness, despite the fact that war is coming.
Did they not know, I ask myself - and the photographs take on the poignance of hindsight. Here they all are, endeavouring to learn how to create beauty, unaware that - or trying to ignore their fears that - all such innocence is about to be shattered. Slaving away, day after day, drawing - on Ozenfant’s insistence “at a tar like pace”, as Darwent puts it - with 9H pencils on vast sheets of paper, while their demanding master struggles with a work no one other than him will ever really care very much about, I feel they are all in a pantomime and I want to shout, “Look behind you.”
It is this that, for me, provides the underlying fascination of the book - the glimpse it gives of that strange time. Was there a true innocence to those years, were the students of the academy able to conceive of a tranquil future where fulfilling their ambitions was possible, or were people deliberately fooling themselves, going through the motions of life, knowing in their hearts that peace wasn’t going to last?
In the book’s final section, Darwent provides a translation of Ozenfant’s diaries from the period and these throw some light on the attitudes of the time. Many passages are funny, (especially the section on mud wrestling), there is a great deal of preoccupation with VIE and its progress and fate - but, as the days go by, the political news from the wider world seeps in increasingly, as things become steadily worse.
At one point Ozenfant’s comments seem to be worryingly applicable to our own situation today, (and is it perhaps precisely that - the suspicion that we too are living at a moment just before something truly terrible happens that as yet we cannot quite foresee - that makes reading about the lives of people during the 1930s so compelling?):
“The powerlessness of moderate democracies comes from the fact that, when times are grave, we all count on a mass, which is to say on each other: and nobody does anything.”
At another moment, he is more prosaic on the threat ahead, or at least more personally focussed:
“I have no money. Hitler is a pain in the ass.”
Darwent writes brilliantly about pictures and is never boring. The book he has produced is a glimpse of an all-but-forgotten enterprise that existed during a precarious moment. I hope that the moment we are living through is not in any way the same.
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*1. Darwent I think explains this very well when he says of Anne Cobham Said’s works that although the subjects were simply things she found near her house in Wiltshire, “their treatment remained essentially the same: so hyper-real as to become surreal.”
(It should also be noted that post-war, Darwent points out, that one aspect of Ozenfant's work - his chromatic theories - were remembered by one person, David Medd, who, with his wife Mary, worked on the design of primary schools in Britain. As a result, Darwent says, "Generations of English schoolchildren would recite their times tables between walls whose colours had been dictated, at one remove, by Amédée Ozenfant.")
