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Purism.
French movement in painting and architecture. Purism was an aesthetic programme initiated c. 1918 by AMÉDÉE OZENFANT and Charles-Edouard Jeanneret (known as LE CORBUSIER in his architectural work after 1920–21) as a reaction to Cubist painting and ideas that dominated avant-garde art in France before World War I. Above all, Purist philosophy is characterized by an admiration for the beauty and purity of the form of the machine. Ozenfant and Le Corbusier advocated a rappel à l’ordre in response to what they perceived to be the distortions and excesses of later, particularly Synthetic Cubism. While they embraced much Cubist subject-matter, particularly the celebration of the ordinary, mass-produced object, they emphasized the geometry, simplicity, proportion and harmony of those objects, rather than their dissection or analysis. The Purists perceived the golden section to be an ideal governing rule in the depiction of form. They preferred that form be presented with unbroken contours and smoothly polished surfaces.
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