Amédée Ozenfant

[1] In 1904 he attended a drawing course run by Jules-Alexandre Patrouillard Degrave at the Ecole Municipale de Dessin Quentin Delatour in Saint-Quentin.

In 1915, in collaboration with Max Jacob and Guillaume Apollinaire, Ozenfant founded the magazine L’Elan, which he edited until 1916, and his theories of Purism began to develop.

In 1924 he opened Académie Moderne, a free studio in Paris with Fernand Léger, where they both taught with Aleksandra Ekster and Marie Laurencin.

[4] His students in London included Leonora Carrington, Sari Dienes, Anne Said, Stella Snead and Hamed Saeed.

Students in New York included his assistant, Chaim Koppelman, the Canadian Madeleine Laliberté and Iranian Manoucher Yektai.

However, by the time he was in England, Ozenfant had refined his ideas about colour and outlined many of these in the six articles on the subject that he wrote for the Architectural Review.

[7]Ozenfant's revised thoughts on the importance of colour were partly due to the influence of the artist Paul Signac and his theories on Divisionism.

[9] This notion of “solidity” increasingly became an issue as the nature of modern construction changed, especially when dealing with such things as the lightweight partition and the glass curtain wall.

In 1937 Ozenfant said: I believe that an immense service would be done to architects, decorators, house-painters etc., if a chart especially adapted to their particular requirements were established.