The great art master who vanished …

Times

2 days ago

There's an Amédée Ozenfant-shaped hole in art history. Which is extraordinary given that the French painter and writer was supposedly as famous as Picasso in the 1920s. With Le Corbusier he founded a movement they called purism. He starred in the first television programme of art made live on air. He opened an art school that welcomed through its doors Leonora Carrington and Henry Moore, who taught there. So, why the disappearing act?
That's the question ricocheting through Charles Darwent's new book, Monsieur Ozenfant's Academy, which according to the author is 'both a microhistory and a story with surprisingly broad reach'. Darwent doesn't have an easy time of it: there's a dearth of sources, and the few surviving accounts are peppered with inconsistencies. Still, he paints a portrait of Ozenfant the man, the artist, the
cultural emissary that's quietly illuminating.
The story begins in 1918 with a pair of plucky young men — Ozenfant and Le Corbusier laying claim to classicism. (Ozenfant suggested to Charles-Édouard Jeanneret that he take the family name Le Corbusier, which sounded stately and could therefore prove useful for their joint venture.) After the mayhem of the First World War, they were canvassing for a new sense of restraint — the opposite reaction to that of their 'Parisian coeval and nemesis', André Breton. While surrealism would deal with destructive energy by embracing it, purism was all about resurrecting 'the clean-limbed, Platonic world of Attic Greece'. Pictorially speaking, there would be an emphasis on line over colour, with objects reduced to simple, reproducible types.
Ozenfant had his first experience of teaching — and of the British — at the Académie Moderne, a free art school founded by Fernand Léger (a fellow purist) in 1920 in Montparnasse. But it wasn't until spring 1936 that he opened the academy at the heart of Darwent's book. In 1934, encouraged by a group of affluent students he had taught in Paris — among them Ursula Blackwell, heiress to the Crosse & Blackwell food fortune — Ozenfant and his wife, Marthe, moved to London. There he established a modest school in a pair of adjoining mews houses on Warwick Road in West Kensington.
Among the few sources at Darwent's fingertips are student testimonies, which bring a splash of colour. 'We used well-sharpened charcoal pencils, building slow compositions with small ticks and much thought, no dashing quick sketches allowed,' recalled Ozenfant's most loyal student, Stella Snead. The future actress Dulcie Gray, who enrolled after seeing an ad in The Times, described the technique the Frenchman imposed on them as 'rigid'; they had to work so methodically, she said, that the life model 'posed problems to painters in the winter by becoming scarlet on the side nearest the stove, and remaining blue with cold on the other'.
The arrival of Carrington — the best-known name, unless the rumours are true that Francis Bacon attended anonymously — coincided with the opening in 1936 of the first International Surrealist Exhibition in Mayfair. (Her departure came about when she and Max Ernst — married and 26 years her senior — became lovers and fled from her enraged father to Cornwall with Roland Penrose and Lee Miller.) Like Carrington, most of Ozenfant's students would become surrealists, whether he liked it or not. But the painting to emerge from the academy would have a particular look: 'For all the Surrealist weirdness of its subjects, it tended to be well drawn, clearly composed; spontaneity with a Purist edge.'
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The Ozenfant Academy of Fine Arts was unique: unlike the existing offerings in London, it offered atelier-style teaching, with a single tutor working alongside a small number of students. Within its walls was an unmistakable sense of camaraderie, and beyond them Ozenfant hoped to foster friendship on an international scale. Back in France, the Blum administration needed a representative in London whose cultural and political aims matched its own. 'Ozenfant, as a socialist and modernist, was to be the Front Populaire's man, flown back and forth to Paris at government expense and his school supported by an official grant,' writes Darwent.
By spring 1939, the threat of war led Ozenfant to close Warwick Road and move with Marthe to New York, where he continued teaching. During the London academy's final months, the director of studies was its former instructor in clay sculpting, Moore. Ozenfant stayed in New York for 16 years, which partly explains his absence in art history: he was away from Paris at a crucial moment in French museology, when the Musée National d'Art Moderne was in the final stages of planning. 'Its collection would define for a generation what was canonical in modern French art and what was not,' writes Darwent. 'Ozenfant was left out of the equation.'
The final quarter of the book comprises pages from the diary Ozenfant kept during the three and a half years he spent in London. Originally published in his Mémoires in 1968, it's deftly translated by Darwent, who describes it as 'a unique record, England and the English seen through French eyes at a moment when British history was becoming all too interesting'.
Ozenfant is witty and droll as he muses on British culture, politics, society. 'The English, ah! How their way of life and good manners help one to live!' he marvels. 'It is, in England, aristocratic to yawn, this shows that you don't belong to the working classes, that you have nothing to do and are always bored. Are we less bored when we yawn all together?' he wonders. My favourite is a short entry from April 24, 1937: 'With a pitying air: The French hold their forks in their right hands.'
As for the royals: 'Their kings don't seem intelligent; but can one expect a flag to be clever?' There's talk of the abdication ('Simpson is the only topic in town') and the coronation, which he gatecrashed with Marthe: 'All in all, hugely impressive, in spite, or because, of the great mound of hypocrisies involved, of ambitions, submissions, of interests, capitulations, conventions; and above all, it was lovely to see.'
Lovely to see, and to read about here. But couldn't we have heard more from the man himself in the preceding pages? I'm not averse to saving the best for last, but the result is a book that feels oddly top — or rather bottom — heavy.