Purism
Formed around 1918, Purism sought to express an art in which objects were depicted in their full potency, stripped of all superfluous details to reveal their core essence. Originally founded by Amédée Ozenfant as a response to Cubism’s fragmentation of viewpoints, it proposed a more stable representation grounded in the geometry of angles and shapes. After Ozenfant’s encounter with Le Corbusier (Edouard Jeanneret), the two began a close collaboration and wrote Après le Cubisme (After Cubism). Shortly afterwards they published L’Esprit Nouveau, which distilled their philosophy: reality reduced to its intrinsic qualities, its expressive strength revealed through mathematical order, and art defined primarily through the notion of the objet‑type. Le Corbusier brought to Purism his experience from the German Werkbund, interpreting these principles of total work of art, machine aesthetics and modernism as a unified programme encompassing figurative arts, architecture, urban planning and applied arts. By 1920 Fernand Léger joined the movement, interpreting Purism with more accentuated colours and contrasting features, not only in painting but also in film, as in Ballet mécanique (Mechanical Ballet).