Word: purism
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Latest victim of Maoist "purism" is Poet Kuo Mojo, 74, longtime president of the Chinese Academy of Science. Kuo recently confessed that "strictly speaking, according to the standards of today, all that I have written should be burned." Other intellectuals who threaten Mao's pre-eminence as poet and philosopher have also come under attack, including Peking's Deputy Mayor Wu Han, who is China's leading historian. The official army newspaper chimed in against "antiParty elements [who are] responding to the great international anti-Chinese chorus of imperialists and various reactionaries to revive the Chinese reactionary...
Died. Amedee Ozenfant, 80, French painter and art theorist who, along with Le Corbusier, issued a 1918 manifesto in Paris denouncing cubism, as then practiced, for being too preoccupied with geometry, instead urged artists to return to the real world, a concept he called "purism"; of a strangulated hernia; in Cannes...
...straight-for the sake of the spirit. Wrote he: "Natural roundness, in a word, corporeality, gives a purely materialist version of objects." Followers of De Stijl designed furniture, built architecture and patterned typography, industrial and household items after its Mondrianesque rules of severity. This year Mondrian's rigid purism has been stretched over shapes more curvilinear than picture frames by Paris Fashion Designers Andre Courreges and Yves St. Laurent, with Seventh Avenue copyists tagging along...
...died last week of a heart attack at 77. Born Charles-Edouard Jeanneret to a family of Swiss watchmakers, Le Corbusier adopted one of his mother's family names as an artistic signature and set out to become an architect and painter. He embraced the cult of purism, an art style so puritani cal that it purged even the strict geometries of cubism of any traces of anecdote or decoration. And he became a student of Auguste Perret, the pioneer of building with reinforced concrete. Two years after meeting Léger, Le Corbusier turned out a slim, cocksure...
Before his death three years ago, Eero Saarinen traveled a long way to ward an architecture far beyond the glass-and-steel purism that seemed the ultimate in construction a decade ago. His Yale colleges are mounds of masonry; his Dulles airport terminal is canopied concrete; his CBS building a granite monument in great triangular piers. His headquarters (see opposite page) for Deere & Co., makers of farm machinery, returns to glass and steel-used in an utterly original...