Bukowskis presents Amédée Ozenfant at Modern Art + Design. Viewing the 12th to the 16th of May, Auction the 17th and 18th of May.
In the 1920s, the father of Purism, Amédée Ozenfant, completed a number of stripped down still lives derived from the composition featured in our auction, with three vases in the centre (see, for example, ”The Vases”, 1925, at MoMA). In this composition, a wine glass and cocktail glass have been added at each corner. The reddish-brown tones of the vases are in elegant contrast to the two different warm greys of the background.
Amédée Ozenfant was born on the 15th of April 1886 in Saint-Quentin in France. He started painting in his teens and in 1907 enrolled at the Académie de la Palette in Paris, where he studied under Jacques Émile Blanche. In 1908, he started to exhibit at the Salon de la Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts and had an exhibition at the Salon d'Automne two years later.
Between 1909 and 1913, Ozenfant travelled in Russia, Italy, Belgium and the Netherlands and attended lectures at the Collège de France in Paris. In 1915, during the First World War, he founded the magazine L'Élan in Paris with Max Jacob and Guillaume Apollinaire, later becoming its editor. The magazine was associated with Dadaism and here Ozenfant’s theories of a purism of art started to take shape.
“Simplification, distortion of forms, and modifications of natural appearances, are ways of arriving at intense expressiveness of form”
Amédée Ozenfant
Ozenfant School of Fine Arts
In 1938, Amédée Ozenfant moved to New York, following a period in London where he started his own art school. The Ozenfant School of Fine Arts ran between 1939 and 1955. Ozenfant became a US citizen in 1944, teaching and lecturing extensively across the USA until 1955. He then returned to France, where he remained for the rest of his life, dying in Cannes in 1966.
Today, Amédée Ozenfant’s works are found in the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Tate Gallery in London, Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Centre Pompidou etc.
The work will be sold at the Modern Art + Design auction on May 17th – 18th.
Viewing May 12th – 16th, Berzelii Park 1, Stockholm.
Auction Live May 17th – 18th, Arsenalsgatan 2, Stockholm.
