THE DECORATIVE ART OF TODAY

Le Corbusier

6.25 x 9.52 softcover book with 214 pages and b/w illustrations. This book was inspired by and written as a protest to the Decorative Arts Exhibition mounted in paris in 1925. Corbu warned about certain dangerous trends he saw emerging in interior, industrial, and architectural design. He called for an architecture that satisfied the imperatives of function through form and for an interior and an industrial design that responded tot he needs of machine-age methods of production.

An anthologized version of Le Corbusier's journal "L'Esprit Nouveau," assembled specifically for the 1925 International Exposition of Decorative and Industrial Arts in Paris.

The basis of the Purist movement is the work made between 1918 and 1925 by Purism's founders and leading proponents, Ozenfant and Jeanneret (Le Corbusier), and the work of 1920 - 25 by their closest colleague, Fernand Léger. Purism evolved as a response to both the artistic and the historic conditions in post - World War I Paris. Realized particularly in painting and architecture, Purism championed a traditional classicism with a formal focus on clean geometries, yet it simultaneously embraced new technologies, new materials, and the machine aesthetic.

By 1917, both the Swiss-born Jeanneret and Ozenfant - who came from the French provinces - were living in Paris. Ozenfant encouraged Jeanneret to paint (in addition to working on his architectural projects), and in late 1918 they had a two-person exhibition in Paris. The imagery of the works exhibited was pared down and based on geometric forms (the cylinder, the sphere, the cube); the paintings depicted landscapes in addition to the still lifes that would ultimately define Purist subject matter. More important than the exhibition, however, was the publication that immediately preceded it. Après le cubisme (After Cubism), written by Ozenfant and Jeanneret, claimed simply to be a series of commentaries defining the current condition of art, but it is, in fact, a manifesto for postwar French painting. It includes a brief but powerful articulation of the relationship between art and science, both of which strive to put the universe in balance. The chapter of Après le cubisme entitled "The Laws" establishes the philosophical underpinnings of Purism. "Great art [has] the ideal of generalizing, which is the highest goal of the spirit.... [It] scorn[s] chance... art must generalize to attain beauty."

In 1925 the International Exposition of Decorative and Industrial Arts opened in the center of Paris. According to official documents announcing the fair in 1924, it was open to anyone "whose production presents ... clearly modern tendencies. That is to say, any copying or counterfeiting of ancient styles is strictly forbidden." For the exposition, Le Corbusier designed the Pavillon de l'Esprit Nouveau (Pavilion of the New Spirit), an example of his desire to make high-quality, avant-garde architecture and design available to the masses. It was designed as the basic standardized module for Le Corbusier's utopian urban plans of the early 1920s, conceived to accommodate up to 3 million inhabitants.

As might be expected, the Pavillon de l'Esprit Nouveau was praised by some and vilified by others. Its legacy, however, is indisputable, in the history of architecture as well as in the history of urbanism and urban planning. Ironically, then, it marked the end - in 1925 - of the close collaboration between Ozenfant and Jeanneret (Le Corbusier) and of Purism as a coherent movement.

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