ED RUSCHA

Random phrases become mantras, and simplicity becomes confusing. This is at the heart of Ed Ruscha’s genius: an ability to use typography and paint to elevate words into something considerable. Heavy Industry is inherently vague; painted on a used canvas rotated ninety degrees, where the ghosts of previous words are scarcely visible through thick brown paint, it provides no answers, and asks no direct questions and yet leaves the viewer with an unshakeable sense that something is being said. The industry in question is not explicit, it’s weight is up to us to decide and so Ruscha is able to use the vernacular and tactics of advertising to, by removing the context, force us to focus on linguistics and meaning in a way that explicit commercialism is not able to. Ruscha changed his typeface to suit the words, and here, in heavy, almost gothic, serifed font, the painting seems to inhabit the very phrase it proclaims - every element speaks to ‘Heavy Industry’, while leaving it entirely up to us to decide what that means.

MARK ROTHKO

Having studied under the father of Color-Field painting himself, Josef Albers, Mark Rothko took the genre in new and staggering directions. Applying thin layers of diluted oil paint, painstakingly slowly so as to build up soft hues on the canvas such that the works are almost luminous in their color, Rothko wanted to control the viewer on a carnal level. He removed the intellectualism of Albers and many of the abstract expressionists around him. Instead, he didn’t want the viewer to try and rationalise the work or any feelings it provoked - Rothko tried to find an innate, visceral science to color that when executed in tandem and relation to each other, as seen here, could bring the viewer on a preset journey of emotion. It is for this same reason that almost all of his works were unnamed - any context outside of the experience of viewing them felt unnecessary and could detract from the deeply human experience of hues and shades affecting oneself.

CHARLES G. SHAW

Definitions of the abstract are loose. What is an abstraction to one person is figurative reality to another, and the movement of American Abstraction is loosely defined with each practitioner understanding their role and subject matter differently. For Shaw, his ‘Plastic Polygons', as he called them, were not abstractions of the New York architecture but truthful depictions of concrete objects, and he coined the movement ‘concretionism’. The works are pioneering, and helped lay the foundations for so many artists that followed, but he was painting in a time when abstract art of any sense was not fully accepted by the critical vanguard or the commercial collectors. Soft palette and sharp lines create an atmosphere, but the work is mostly unemotional or expressive - instead, they are an attempt to depict the beauty of a rigorous system through form and color. For years Shaw painted in the series, and with each show and painting he moved the dial slowly to create an environment of acceptance to more radical forms.

HANS HOFMANN

Born in the age of Van Gogh, dead in the age of Warhol; across generations, centuries, and continents, the artist Hans Hofmann reshaped the world of art through teaching and painting. Born and educated in Germany, when Hofmann moved to America at the age of 52 he brought with him a deep understanding of and ability to synthesis the disparate movements of the European avant-garde. His show with Peggy Guggenheim not a decade later marked a turning point in the development of American abstraction and further established his reputation as a force of change. Hofmann was seen as an elder statesman in practically every movement of American modernism, not only for his paintings but for his role as a teacher. In Munich, in 1915, he set up what is widely regarded as the first ever school of Modern Art, and he brought it with him to America where his list of students reads as a who’s who of 20th century visual pioneers. Hofmann was rigorous in his beliefs, and his greatest skill as an educator was to teach his students to be rigorous in theirs. He held everyone, including himself, to the highest of artistic standards, understanding that art taken seriously could change the world, and through Hofmann’s tutelage, so many did.

GEORGES SEURAT

Known for his exacting, pointillist style where thousands of precise points of color create a soaring, monumental work - this painting is an example of Seurat’s process. Painting en plein air, which was the vogue of the day where artists would paint outside from life to capture the extreme present of light and atmosphere, Seurat would take these studies back to his studio to transform them into larger works. Out in the wild, the points are transformed into broad, loose brushstrokes and the blues, grays, and greens of the Normandy coastline are suggested by the evidence of a human hand, smearing work on the panel. Seurat, like so many of the avant-garde artists of his day, spent his summer in the boating towns of Northern France. The slower pace of life let him develop his process and style, and it is in these small studies on panels that we can see the inner working of his mind, grappling with his ambitions to capture space and time in a radical new way.

REMEDIOS VARO

Remedios Varo spend most of the 1930s on the run. First from her native Spain where her outspoken political activism and relationship with a known anarchist artist made her a target for Franco in the rising Spanish Civil War. And then from Nazism in her adopted Paris for much the same reasons. A decade was spent moving from town to town in Western Europe, living a bohemian life of coffee shops, art and destitution with the avant-garde intellectuals of the day. While she was painting throughout, and well regarded for her surrealist works of esoteric magic, it was not until 1941 when she settled in Mexico City that she reached artistic maturity. The work made there is complex and beautiful, as much inspired by the folk practices of Mexico as the European Surrealists and intellectuals she had spent the previous decade with. There are nods to occult magic, and heady psychoanalytical dives into the subconscious which combine to make her work somewhat unclassifiable. It was while in Mexico that she became friends with Leonora Carrington and Kati Horna and, together, they became known as ‘The Three Witches of Surrealism’. Yet the name has always been unjust, as together they elevated surrealist ideas into something more tender and complex, removing the masculine edge parts of the movement had to create a style that feels, even today, singular.

GAUDENZIO FERRARI

Rising from his open tomb, Christ stands firm, looking down on us and pointing towards heaven. His burial shroud billows around him like a halo of holy light and his tenant bears the cross of St. George. It is a work of victory, commemorating Christ’s victory over death, and a testament to his place beside God. In each brushstroke is a sense of defiance and power, Ferrari considered every element of Christ’s appearance to contribute towards a sense of triumph, and to place the viewer in a lowly position. Originally the central part of an altar piece, and significant in it’s scale; seen in situ, the work would speak to the power of Christ, dwarfing the viewer below it as he rises from a mortal place of death to become a warrior of eternity. 

CLAUDE MONET

Monet and his friend, the artist Frédéric Bazille, spent the summer of 1864 on the Northern French coast at the summer house of Monet’s parents. There, they kept gentle hours and spent the days painting en plein air, depicting the area around Honfleur from dozens of different viewpoints. The works are typically Impressionist in the style, short thick brushstrokes that capture a feeling of summertime, but they are perhaps more exacting in their detail than later works by Monet where a looseness on display here became more dominant. Monet was a young man, still finding the essence of the style he would come to represent, and Bazille was his closest friend in these years. Together, the two artists traveled France in search of motifs, and they found it in Honfleur. The varied landscape provided ample opportunity to experiment and refine, and by the end of the summer Monet had broken through into a new maturity of style that would rise as he became the most significant painter of his generation.

STUART DAVIS

At the age of 19 Stuart Davis was the youngest artist in the 1913 Armory Show, a turning point in American Modernism. The work he was there, especially those by Matisse, Van Gogh, and Picasso, had a profound effect on him, and for the next decade he was a devotee to the schools of Cubism and Modernism, painting works that fit into the contemporary avant-garde. By the start of the 1920s, however, Davis had developed as a painter and found a signature style quite unlike anything being made at the time. Predating Pop-Art by nearly 40 years, he fused advertising graphics and commercial products with a hard lines and flat expanses of colour in works he called ‘Color-Space Compositions’. To begin, these were limited to still lives and landscapes, but in 1928 he spent a year in Paris where he would travel around the city each day and return home to paint the urban scenes he had encountered. To look at these works today is to feel a familiarity with the style, something harmonious and understandable, but at the time these were radical explorations of art. Davis used foundations of simplicity, reducing spatial perception, to add adornments of complication that reveal hidden details and meaning in every corner.

WALT KUHN

A boy from the Brooklyn docks, working at a bicycle repair shop at the turn of the 20th century, set off for California with sixty dollars in his pocket and the dream to create art. Once there, he travelled to Europe and traversed the continent, exploring the fledgling artistic movements and finding himself as an early American voyeur to modernism. Bringing this movement back to his native New York, Kuhn worked to establish a school of American Modernism and in 1913, organised the legendary Armoury Show which established the United States as a consequential player in the new artistic world. Yet as he aged, Kuhn came to the question his loyalty to the modernism he had championed, and found himself between worlds, adrift in the seas he himself had planted. While his earlier work depicted performers, dancers, circus acts and vaudeville characters, his later work came to focus on still lives. There is something in the flowers, their droops and springs, the curves and sharp edges that still carries something of the performer in them. In his moments of calmness, Kuhn still found a part of the energetic, young man seeking new life and experiences. 

PIETER LASTMAN

In the throngs of a crowd, as the heat of a burning altar warms their faces, two friends decide which one of them is to die and which is to live. Orestes and Pylades, so goes the ancient Greek tale, had travelled to Tauris to steal the statue of Artemis, but were found out and, as was custom for any unwanted visitor, sentenced to death at the altar. Yet, taking pity on the friends, the priestess of the temple allowed them to chose between them who was to be sacrificed for the other. Both fought for their own death, to save their friend and, in the end, neither were killed as the priestess of the temple was none other than Orestes long lost sister Iphigenia. Lastman was the first artist to paint this story, and for all of it’s complications, his rendering is succinct and effective. He cuts through much of the contextual difficulty of the story to find the heart of the fable - one of sacrifice, and the platonic love between friends and siblings. 

LOUISE NEVELSON

Louise Nevelson’s life was to be a tale of 20th Century immigration, steady progress through social classes, and a domestic life in leafy Mount Vernon, if it were not undone by her bravery and commitment to art. Emigrating from Ukraine as a child to the United States, and marrying into a wealthy family in her early 20s, she was expected to be a socialite wife and home-maker, educated on culture but not so bold as to assume she could create it herself. “Within that circle you could know Beethoven”, she said, “but god forbid you were Beethoven.” Yet she was gifted in a wide field of art, and had longed to be an artist since she was a child so, in 1930, at the age of 31, she separated from her husband, accepting no financial support, sold the diamond bracelet he had once given her as a gift, and returned to Europe alone to absorb the artistic culture of the day. Nevelson would go on to redefine American sculpture, but this small sketch on paper was painted during her time in Europe, its loose lines and relaxed feeling clearly informed by Matisse and Picasso. It is the fledgling work of an artist striking out on their own, still awaiting the medium that will call them, but confident in the strength of their character, and the necessity to speak out.

BARNETT NEWMAN

Forms, shapes, discernible meaning: all of these got in the way of Barnett Newman’s mission. He wanted to create art that so engulfed the viewer, was so inescapable in scale and drama that, without distraction, it tapped into a universal understanding. It was only in this way, he thought, that art could approach the sublime, and the aesthetic could elevate the human spirit to a place of purity. Day One is monumental in size while being close to as simple as possible. Save for the two thin lines of slightly contrasting hues, the work is a color-field painting of orange that seems to burst into your brain with abandon. It is, in fact, those two lines of contrasting hue that give the work its power. Newman called them zips, and their purpose is to animate and elevate the central colour - they are not their for beauty but for utility, to uplift and embolden the reach of a single colour towards that final goal of sublimity. 

ANNIBALE CARRACCI

Lauded and lusted after by great collectors over millennia, it stayed in the single commissioning family for most of its life, rejecting offers from the King of England for its possession before finding its permanent home in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1836. Annibale Carracci’s monumental work was an object of desire not simply for its aesthetic beauty or holy reverence but for its position as the synthesis of an era. Carracci is regarded as one of the founders of Baroque, returning to the classical monumentality of early Renaissance masters but adding in a vivid and dynamic lifeblood. Here, he took the styles of the day from across northern and southern Italy and united them into something that felt remarkably new. Classical sculpture, the cartoons of Rafael and the bright Roman frescoes of the 1400s meet in a work that rejected the more naturalistic vogues that Caravaggio was pioneering and brought back a sense of dramatics to religious art that would sustain for the hundreds of years after his passing.

GEORGIA O’KEEFE

While cubism swept America and predominantly male artists found sacred abstraction in harsh, geometric forms, Georgia O’Keefe was looking elsewhere. A pioneer of the abstract American painting, she was not interested in the rigorous, almost mathematical deconstruction of the European schools that found its abstraction through an imposed distance from the natural seen world. Instead, she looked directly to nature, finding beauty and inspiration in the organic forms that surrounded her and the rhythms of the living world. She began a series of charcoal drawings that tried to place the images she found in her subconscious, forms that for her were perhaps a part of the universal psyche but difficult to access. They are grasps towards the unknown, ways to capture a feeling of existence by isolating the movement of nature, and she returned, over the course of her career to the spiral. Seen here in fleshy monotone, it speaks at once to life and death, a dark void that moves downwards until it finds the centre and here, experiences rebirth.

AGNES PELTON

Agnes Pelton left Long Island for a new life in the Southern California desert. The sea change of the title is both a personal and a cultural one, as she felt the visual world moving into heady, metaphysical directions. The work is oblique, its abstract forms are shapely and organic, conjuring up the ebb and flow of water and the curvature of the female form in equal measure. It is unplaceable, framed by architectural details that open onto neither sea nor land but instead a consciousness. Pelton saw the movement of thought in the movement of the tides, of nature, that lapped and retreated in quiet crescendoes before crashing into realisation. Art, she thought, channeled the universal energies around us through color and light, able to be perceived as active being which vibrate like, Pelton said, “the fragrance of a flower [which] fills the consciousness with the essence of its life.” 

ISAAC ISRAËLS

Visually striking, the three girls and their donkeys are little more than coincidental in this work. Instead, it is a classic of Impressionism in that is more a study of light that of anything so concrete as human figures. Israël captures an essence of summer, and the fact that the girls he painted were real people, children of his friends, does not negate from the universality of his depiction. Nature, childhood, sun, sand, and sea - these are the top line ideas, the qualities that across the globe we associate with the warm months, and with a sense of freedom. Israëls philosophy supports this idea, he believed in painting quickly, never working too hard or too long on a piece lest it began to take on a feeling of laboriousness. Instead, he painting quickly, no more than two hours at a time, in doing so was able to capture a sense of urgency and vitality that can come only with the extreme present.

ROY LICHTENSTEIN

In 1920, Piet Mondrian reached his artistic maturity with a style that would redefine the very meaning of art. Thin black lines separating rectangular forms, predominantly white but with scarce bursts of primary colours. It was the realisation of Mondrain’s vision for “pure abstract art… completely emancipated, free of naturalistic appearances’, and was, for many, the pinnacle of abstraction. Yet, 40 odd years later, the American pop artist  Roy Lichtenstein paints a Mondrian and, while he changes almost nothing, completely redefines the very nature of abstraction. Lichtenstein’s paints a Mondrian because Mondrian’s signature style was so defined, had such a unique and clear language, that it was able to be generically reproduced. And all that Lichtenstein changes is the addition of two panels of Ben-Day dots as a stand in for solid colour. He abstracts that which is reduced to its most simple, turns a solid block into repetitive disks, removing Mondrian’s artistic conclusion even further away from the naturalistic appearance it was escaping. For all that, the piece works on another, more disquieting level. By co-opting and adapting a style of total abstraction, Lichtenstein undoes the very goal it set out to seek. The piece is no longer abstract, instead it is a representational, photo-realist recreation of an object. The work has been retained, it’s visual success has made it a style, and so it has lost its freedom for it represents above all itself.

HAROLD E. EDGERTON

With new mediums come new realities. In the fledgling days of photography, Eadweard Muybridge photographed movement to show a hidden world, capturing for the first time with a camera that which the human eye could not see and freezing time into thousands of single moments that could be analysed, explored and understood. It would be another 50 years, with the electrical engineer Harold Edgerton, for the very fabric of our perception to be changed by the camera again. Edgerton built a device capable of shooting quickly, and at close range, with the shutter responding to the a disruption caused by the falling drip across a laser sight. It is, perfectly, at the intersection between art and science and the resulting photograph, though it exists in many guises over the 20 years Edgerton experimented, has become one of the most important and significant photographs ever taken. Edgerton did not consider himself an artist, and it is true that the process of creation was entirely mechanical, but he did set the scenes, and build the device that allowed the removal of his hand from the process. And yet in this way, he did so successfully what all artists strive to do: capture truth and show through creation a new perspective on the world around us.

JOHANNES VERMEER

The Dutch Republic of the 1600s was ruled by an aristocratic merchant class of predominantly Calvinists, a Christian branch that emphasised modesty, frugality, and hard work. To advance this belief system as the dominant understanding of the day, they outlawed the public practice of Catholicism, including Mass. Yet while the open display of faith was illegal, to believe was not, so Catholicism retreated inside, to private homes and personal churches built in living rooms and attics across the Netherlands. Johannes Vermeer, a converted Catholic through marriage, painted this, one of his rare allegorical works, in an act of defiant rebellion. Drawing on common symbolism, he paints the Catholic Faith as a woman, conquering the world and the keystone of Christ crushing the evil snake ahead of her. A tapestry is drawn back to reveal the scene, placing us in a ‘hidden church’ and so Vermeer is able, in this way, to stay true to his style of domestic scenes while making allusions to the largest of ideas. Each object is rich in meaning, and Vermeer tells a complicated story through a straightforward scene but the overarching feeling in the painting is one of defiance. Through hardship and rejection, faith will persevere and stand atop the world, broken, tired perhaps, but proud.

MAN RAY

For an exhibition in 1917, Man Ray made a series of ten collages that he framed and installed  on a rotating pole, moveable by the audience, and called ‘Revolving Doors’. The works are geometric abstractions, bright and playful in nature they combine machine like, rigid forms with a loose human touch that brings a musicality to their composition. The works were not well received on their debut, too colourful for those collectors used to the muted palettes of Cubism and lyrical, serious abstraction. The original collages and their revolving stand were destroyed but years later, Ray reproduced the works as a series of prints, such as the one here. Viewed together, they tell a cohesive story of movement and a hopeful modernity but alone, we are able to focus on the formal components. The work is proto-color theory, a study in shades and their interactions, but it also touches on the same themes that Ray returned to throughout his career, a visual depiction of music. The sensual shape of instruments are reduced into geometric purity and the work can almost be heard through the interplay of shape and color.

EDWARD HOPPPER

Most known for his poignant vignettes of quiet moments amongst urbanity, the truest theme of Edward Hopper’s life was not the city, or the man, but America itself. He was a deeply native painter, one who did not want to discuss his art or himself but simply strove to capture the essence of the country into his canvases. His work is almost puritanical, balancing a deep melancholy with a realists eye that searches for truth in the external world, not within. His paintings reveal little of his person, so refined and considered are they, that it is in his study and sketches, such as this, that we can find the man in the brushstrokes. Mostly likely painted as a very young man, still in his twenties, there is a naivety to the drawings that hide a sophisticated composition. In few strokes, he captures a story; a man glancing back as he prepares for the road ahead, a glimmer of trepidation in his face and an unwillingness to reveal himself to the viewer. Yet, for all this, the colouring is playful, the strokes loose and undefined that bring a joy to the scene. This, perhaps, was Hopper’s genius - an ability to marry to mysterious, the melancholy, and the happy in one single vignette that spoke to a country through a single subject.

JOOS DE MOMPER

Some artists cannot escape the death of their tradition. After a century of public adoration and a meteoric rise to the visual vogue, World Landscapes, those imagined, idyllic scenes with biblical influence where figures are dwarfed by their beautiful surroundings, were falling out of favour. Joos de Momper, born in 1567, was too much a man of his time. A master of these dreamlike landscapes, he was not able to adapt to the changing styles that found beauty in realism and more mundane depictions of life. Instead, he found himself as the figurehead of the death of a movement, representing a tradition that the contemporary age found little purpose for. His attempts to adapt were noble in effort, and as he aged the vantage point of his work moved downwards - his fantasy worlds were seen from above while the real world from below; in the former he had the gaze of a creator, and in the latter only that of a common man. He found little success with these later works, and his reputation was tarnished beyond repair such that he died in debt to little acclaim. But though he was caught on the precipice of history, de Momper’s works are feats of beauty and imagination that seem to transcend time today.

BARBARA KRUGER

Working as a magazine designer, Barbara Kruger came to innately understand the linguistic, typographic and visual conventions of consumerism. Single line slogans that sold disposable products week after week, images of airbrushed beauty that promoted shame, and direct instructions to the reader that their life could be better if only they did this, bought that, or changed something in themselves. A sort of meta-commentary on consumerism had been embedded in the art world since the advent of Pop, but Kruger took it beyond simple appropriation or decontextualisation. Her work combines found imagery with cut up phrases, often adulterated from their original form, to create images of a disquieting juxtaposition. The pieces feel immediately, viscerally familiar that to observe them is to question our own comfort with a visual language that wants something from us. Kruger makes us stop and question the inundation of messaging in our daily lives, and from a place of deep understanding forces a reflection on the power of words and images.

PAUL KLEE

When the spirit of rebellion and revolution is in you, the medium to express it becomes secondary. Encouraged by his parents to become a musician, Paul Klee was drawn to the traditional compositions of the 18th century and couldn’t find meaning or the space for radical change in modern music. So, despite a natural talent and expectations, Klee abandoned the practice of music in favour of visual arts where he felt free to express his yearnings for revolution. The decision proved fruitful, and a near forty year career that took Klee across the word resulted in works and writings that radically changed the direction of modern art. A teacher at the Bauhaus, alongside his great friend Wassily Kandinsky, Klee’s images are studies of colour theory, underpinned by a dry wit. It was through a lack of natural understanding of colour but skill as a draftsman that drove Klee to find a new theory of colour, one that would become the standard understanding for generations to come.

PAUL SÉRUSIER

Armed with only a letter of introduction from Paul Gaugin, a young 24 year old artist left Paris, heading west towards an artist commune on the Brittany coast. Paul Sérusier was determined to reconnect with nature having completed his studies in the capital, and began to paint landscapes at Port-Aven. On a walk through the idyllic countryside with Gaugin, the older artist asked Sérusier, ‘"How do you see these trees? They're yellow. So, put some yellow. This shadow, it's rather blue, paint it with pure ultramarine. Those red leaves? Put vermillion.” He listened, and this, the resulting work, changed the course of art history. Nature was represented not for its likeness but for its visual sensation, reduced to flat planes and simple colours. Tt was a conclusion to the direction the Impressionists and the first work of the ‘Nabis’, a name taken from the Hebrew word for ‘Prophets’. The name ‘The Talisman’ was given to the painting by the group, it representing the entire movement into modernity and becoming a work of holy importance. 

ALBRECHT DÜRER

Two hands gently pressed together in prayer, sketched as either preparation or posterity, have travelled the world over half a millennia. They have ended up on the tombstone of Andy Warhol, tattooed on thousands of bodies, recreated in endless variation and reproduced on every medium imaginable. Albrecht Dürer’s humble drawing has become, since it was created in the early 1500s, one of the most significant and iconic images of faith in the western world. It is because of this that various myths and stories as to its origin have sprung up over the years, each trying to find some contextual poetry in its creation that justifies its fame and acclaim. Yet the truth is more simple; the hands were painted as either a study for, or a record of, a detail in Dürer’s Heller Altarpiece. Immaculately rendered on precious blue paper there is no doubt Dürer was proud of the work, but their beauty does not come from a grand backstory or a tragic tale, simply from the devotion of an artist trying to capture the flesh and bones of faith in ink and paper. 

KNUD MERRILD

In turn of the century Denmark, Merrild began his career as an apprentice house painter. The monotony of the work was meditative, and the techniques of paint mixing and application formed the basis of his most famous series of works. Yet, for all the influence his ‘Flux’ paintings had on 20th century abstract expressionism, Merrild worked as a house painter on occasion throughout his life, it serving as a financial bedrock in eras of low income. The ‘Flux’ paintings, such as the one here, were made by diluting oil paints into viscous, flowable forms, and dripping them onto the canvas in rhythmic motion to create post-surreal works that serve as a collaboration between Merrild and chance itself. Moving to America in the early 1920s, he became part of a group of writers that included D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, and Aldous Huxley, who all saw in the experimental Dane a kindred spirit who expressed his ideas of post-modernity through abstract forms rather than words. 

ALEKSANDER RODCHENKO

One year after this artwork was made, Rodchenko declared the end of painting. In a seminal exhibition in his native Russia, he presented three works, each a canvas displaying a single colour - the first monochromatic paintings in art history. “I reduced painting to its logical conclusion”, he said, “I affirmed: it’s all over”. But this did not come from nowhere, in fact Rodchenko had been engaging in quiet revolution and dissent for most of his artistic life, creating work that built off of Kazemir Malevich’s Suprematism to find the simplest reduction of form possible. For all of his work as a painter, it is graphic design that perhaps owes its greatest debt to Rodchenko’s geometric renderings. He worked methodically, trying to illuminate human visibility in his works, making his brushstrokes so clinical as to look machine operated. He had an innate understanding of composition and colour, and so much of the simplicity of contemporary design was born from a young man in 1920’s Russia’s attempts at finding order in a world of chaos. 

AMÉDÉÉ OZENFANT

Art consists in the conception before anything else, and technique is merely a tool at the service of conception. These are two of the tenets of Purism, a movement founded in rebellion to the perceived ornamentation of Cubism by Ozenfant and, perhaps more significantly, Le Corbusier. In the war-torn France of 1918, ravaged by the First World War, Purism emerged as a way to bring back order. Cubism had become the de-facto school of Art and had strayed from it’s earliest intentions to become romantic and decorative, with an emphasis on detail that detracted from it’s radical, abstract origins. With Purism, Ozenfant and Corbusier focused on the essence of objects, free from details or decoration the forms are allowed to stand alone and find beauty in the simplicity of the world around us. It was a way to return to nature, without copying it, and while their unison ended, both Ozenfant and Corbusier held these ideas with them for the rest of their lives, and Le Corbusier used them to create the modern language of design and architecture.