Art: Preaching Painter

In Seattle last week, 50 art students of the University of Washington summer school had an experience: listening to the lectures of a small, swarthy painter, art historian, moralist, critic, ex-automobile racer named Amédée Ozenfant who was making his first U. S. visit. His shattered English made intelligible by generous gestures, abundant enthusiasm, Instructor Ozenfant impressed on them the message he has been preaching in Europe for 20 years: that great art realizes the constant elements in human experience.

If students considered this point obvious, they did not know Ozenfant. He is known in Europe as one of the most provocative theoreticians of modern art. Born in Picardy 52 years ago, he began expounding his ideas about it in 1915, later became associated with Modernist Architect Le Corbusier, founded a school of painting called Purism, taught, lectured, wrote books, studied Egyptian, Chinese and Negro art, and raced automobiles until his 40th year, when on a slippery racetrack near Paris, his racer turned over, left him scratched up and convinced that he was too old for that sport.

To Ozenfant, modern painting began with Cezanne, who “broke away from nature.” Imitation cannot reproduce nature, says Ozenfant, but equivalents can; a composer of music does not try to capture nature by imitating animal sounds, but by writing a pastoral symphony. In his landscapes, Cezanne did not try to reproduce the appearance of the scene he painted, but to recreate in paint the emotions that the scene produced on him. The Cubists went further, tried “to evoke emotions by the exhibition of colored forms” which did not “look like” anything in particular. But Ozenfant showed (by photographs of cubistic and surrealistic-like scenes from modern life, by reproductions of Egyptian and prehistoric art) that the paintings of abstract artists were related to the contemporary steel-&-stone world, or to the art of earlier periods. Painting has a vocabulary, as does literature, but its vocabulary is color and form; and Ozenfant’s advice to painters is to eschew what is fashionable, ephemeral, frivolous in their use of this vocabulary.

Convinced that abstract art has served its purpose, Ozenfant now believes that it is waning, wants painters to work for the social world and to paint for everybody pictures that will be recognizable to everybody. In Seattle he is preparing an exhibition of his own painting, finishing a semi-autobiographical volume, dropping the oblique, off-hand remarks that distinguish his work far more than its formal arguments. Typical Ozenfant aphorisms: “It is not art that fails, but the artist.” “Art is the demonstration that the ordinary is extraordinary.” “Let us once a year . . . enjoy all our rights, including that of not abusing them.” “There are 30,000 painters in Paris. Counting one per thousand there are thirty geniuses among them. I must have made a mistake somewhere.”