(Saint-Quentin 1886 – 1966 Cannes)
Pitcher, guitar, big white jug, 1921, signed Ozenfant, gouache and pastel on paper, 52.3 x 42 cm, framed

This work will be included in the supplément of the catalogue raisonné des oeuvres sur papier d’Amédée Ozenfant under no. 1921/OP-018, currently being compiled by Mr. Pierre Guénégan.

Provenance:
Galerie Berri-Raspail, Paris (label on the reverse)
formerly Zitreen Collection, USA
Berri-Lardy et Cie, Paris
European Private Collection

This composition is informed by the Purist aesthetic as developed by Amédée
Ozenfant and Le Corbusier in 1918. Drawing on pre-1914 Cubism, particularly the coolly rational interpretation of Juan Gris, they dismissed its subsequent evolution as too decorative and unordered. They felt that the chaos of the natural world should be dispelled by the organizing mechanisms of the human mind. This conviction became a moral imperative that Ozenfant and Le Corbusier attempted to uphold in their work.

Ozenfant used the following metaphor to describe the function of rational thought:
“A lens concentrates the diffuse rays of the sun and creates fire by converging those rays. To converge is to refine something in nature, so as to render it more concentrated, compact, penetrative, intense: it helps to facilitate the manifestations of that phenomenon and to render it effective and useful for humanity.” Ozenfant’s application of this principle to Pitcher, guitar, big white jug results in a composition that is lucid and geometric.
Purism, with its principle of the rational instead of the decorative, stands at the beginning of a new aesthetic that continued to be felt in Functionalism.
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