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Lot Essay
The authenticity of this work has been kindly confirmed by the Fondation Le Corbusier, Paris.
"In France in 1918 the architect Le Corbusier joined the painter Amédée Ozenfant in publishing an arts magazine, 'Esprit Nouveau. The Purists - as Ozenfant and Le Corbusier called themselves - aspired to regain the general public interest in modern art which they believed the Cubists had lost. They therefore built up their pictorial compositions out of everyday objects such as bottles, pitchers and glasses whose forms were familiar to everyone. But they also believed that these objects had reached an anonymous sort of standardised purity in their simple shapes which coincided with purist aspirations for industrial art. They used the most agreeable pastel colouring in preference to the harsher tonalities of the Cubists, and sought an evenness of touch and a smoothness of finish which they considered appropriate to a machine age" (H.-R. Hitchcock, Painting Toward Architecture, New York 1948, p. 26).
"In France in 1918 the architect Le Corbusier joined the painter Amédée Ozenfant in publishing an arts magazine, 'Esprit Nouveau. The Purists - as Ozenfant and Le Corbusier called themselves - aspired to regain the general public interest in modern art which they believed the Cubists had lost. They therefore built up their pictorial compositions out of everyday objects such as bottles, pitchers and glasses whose forms were familiar to everyone. But they also believed that these objects had reached an anonymous sort of standardised purity in their simple shapes which coincided with purist aspirations for industrial art. They used the most agreeable pastel colouring in preference to the harsher tonalities of the Cubists, and sought an evenness of touch and a smoothness of finish which they considered appropriate to a machine age" (H.-R. Hitchcock, Painting Toward Architecture, New York 1948, p. 26).