Overview

Before the Second World War, an art school stood in a pair of mews houses off Kensington High Street in London. Although the school was small and short-lived, it would be linked to an extraordinary range of talent. Leonora Carrington was one of its students; Henry Moore taught there; Francis Bacon and Eduardo Paolozzi both cited its creator as the reason they had become artists. The school bore his name: the Amédée Ozenfant Academy of Fine Arts. Ozenfant and his school are largely forgotten, yet in the 1920s the man who, with Le Corbusier, invented the style they called Purism, was as well known as Picasso. His academy was a solitary outpost of the Parisian avant-garde in London; Ozenfant was, said France's education minister, ""the man who represented French art in Britain"". As war drew nearer, this lent him an importance that was not just cultural but political. Charles Darwent's book quietly redraws the history of Anglo-French relations in the late 1930s. Distributed for Art Publishing Inc.

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9781739469412

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Reviews

“[Darwent] paints a portrait of Ozenfant the man, the artist, the cultural emissary that’s quietly illuminating.”—Chloë Ashby, Times (UK) “Leaves one fond of Ozenfant and grateful to Darwent for retrieving him from obscurity.”—Will Wiles, Literary Review “Ozenfant, friend and collaborator of Le Corbusier and Fernand Léger—and co-founder of Purism (a restrained and very French strain of modern art) that manifested itself in his hands as a crisply architectural form of cubism—has now been resurrected by the estimable Charles Darwent, a sage writer on mid-century art. As well as a diverting account of Ozenfant’s life in Paris, London and New York, Darwent includes his own translation of the diary entries Ozenfant kept during his London sojourn that contain a mixture of picaresque views on the darkening politics of the time and his own life as a cultural emissary.”—Michael Prodger, New Statesman “As Charles Darwent elegantly shows, the short life of Monsieur Ozenfant’s Academy might be recast as a moment with wide-reaching reverberations for international art history.”—Francesca Wade, Times Literary Supplement

“Leaves one fond of Ozenfant and grateful to Darwent for retrieving him from obscurity.”—Will Wiles, LiteraryReview ""Ozenfant, friend and collaborator of Le Corbusier and Fernand Léger – and co-founder of Purism (a restrained and very French strain of modern art) that manifested itself in his hands as a crisply architectural form of cubism – has now been resurrected by the estimable Charles Darwent, a sage writer on mid-century art. As well as a diverting account of Ozenfant’s life in Paris, London and New York, Darwent includes his own translation of the diary entries Ozenfant kept during his London sojourn that contain a mixture of picaresque views on the darkening politics of the time and his own life as a cultural emissary"". - Michael Prodger, The New Statesman 

Author Information

Charles Darwent is an art critic and author. He contributes regularly to The Guardian, The Art Newspaper and Art Review, and was the chief art critic for the Independent on Sunday from 1999–2013. He appeared on the Netflix series Raiders of the Lost Art from 2014–2016. He is the author of Surrealists in New York (2023), Josef Albers: Life and Work (2018), and Mondrian in London: How British Art Nearly Became Modern (2012).

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