Between the spring of 1936 and February 1939, an unassuming pair of mews houses at 170–2 Warwick Road, in West Kensington, London, became the home of England’s only French art school, the Amédée Ozenfant Academy of Fine Arts. Its founder had moved to London to escape the economic and political turmoil in France, at the encouragement of former pupils at his Paris academy (among them Ursula Goldfinger, wife of the architect and heir to the food company that made Branston Pickle), who found him the building. Here, students could be found drawing from life, scrambling eggs on the solitary stove or discussing the merits of surrealism: the huge first International Surrealist Exhibition had opened at the New Burlington Galleries in Mayfair in 1936, showing works by artists including Salvador Dalí, Man Ray, Meret Oppenheim and René Magritte. A large skylight illuminated the main studio, which was divided by a curtain from a private space where Monsieur Ozenfant worked on his painting “Vie”, a monumental vision of human solidarity that Charles Darwent describes, in his intriguing history of the school’s brief life, as “nothing less than a panoptic history of everything”. The enormous canvas – three by four metres – is populated by an uncanny crowd of figures embracing, jostling, helping one another upwards: “A jumble of lives,” wrote Ozenfant, “obeying at the same moment the same essential forces.”
Though he had visited Britain only once before, Ozenfant was well known in the art world for his influential book Art (1928), translated into English by John Rodker in 1931 as Foundations of Modern Art. The book contained hundreds of illustrations, not only of works of art, but also of technology and iconography (“cave paintings and steam turbines, pygmies and speedometers”, writes Darwent), juxtaposed in ways designed to draw out incongruous connections and stimulate the imagination: Darwent notes that several works by Francis Bacon feature versions of, or derive directly from, images in the book. Yet Ozenfant’s emphasis, as a teacher, was not on art’s history, but on its practice. The first prospectus announced that his school would instil in pupils a “technical, theoretical and empirical spirit”. It’s tempting to wonder whether it was the promise of such rigorous training or the glamorous association with the French avant-garde that attracted the majority of Ozenfant’s students.
What did those students – probably some couple of hundred over the three years – learn? Few left much testimony of their time at the school, meaning Darwent’s research often runs into tantalizing loose ends and unanswerable questions. Among its earliest students – and by far its most famous – was the young Leonora Carrington, who arrived at the school fresh from a brief stint at the Chelsea School of Art, and probably began her first surrealist painting, “Self- Portrait (The Inn of the Dawn Horse)”, while under Ozenfant’s tuition. Several of his best pupils, at least those whose works survive, were drawn to the surrealist mode. His teaching, however, far from encouraging students to embrace the unconscious, was strict and methodical, focused on the importance of shape and outline, the chemistry of pencil and paper: Carrington remembered drawing the same apple for six months, as it progressively mummified. But, as Darwent points out, it was necessary to know the rules in order to break them. Ozenfant gave his students their technical grounding: what they did with it was up to them.
Ozenfant was no surrealist. In 1920, he had co- authored an article with his friend Charles-Édouard Jeanneret (later known as Le Corbusier) titled “Le Purisme”. Accompanied by a photograph (staged against a fake backdrop) of the two men in a hot-air balloon, it called for “a new sense of restraint”, both in art and in postwar French society. If surrealism celebrated the irrational, and cubism distortion, “purism” was all about order: good planning, fine execution, a return to classical forms and values. Ozenfant was drawn to simplified, flattened shapes in a muted range of colours. His subject matter, Darwent writes, was “not objects but ‘object types’, things that have been made for generations and, in the process, evolved into pure economical forms”.
The movement failed to gain much traction, and Ozenfant and Jeanneret seem to have parted ways around 1925, by which point Ozenfant was teaching at the Académie Moderne in Paris, founded by Fernand Léger, one of the few other exponents of purism. His students there included Sari Dienes, who became the deputy director of his London academy. It was Dienes who recruited Henry Moore to take over teaching when Ozenfant departed, abruptly, for New York in February 1939; Dienes and another longtime pupil, Stella Snead, both followed him there, though neither stayed long at the American iteration of the Ozenfant Academy, which lasted until 1955.
Darwent’s beautifully illustrated book is complemented by a small exhibition at Richard Saltoun Gallery in Mayfair, Seeds of Surrealism: Women of Monsieur Ozenfant’s Academy. Carrington, disappointingly, is represented by a single sketchbook from 1941, when she was living in a sanitorium in Santander, Spain, an experience she describes in her memoir Down Below (1944). She and Snead struck up a friendship at the school, which they rekindled years later after a chance encounter in New York. (Darwent reproduces a wonderful photo-collage made by Snead, showing Carrington bedecked with cut-out figures of fantastical animals.) Snead’s painting “Woman with Cats” (1938) – which Darwent describes as lost, but which the gallery has fortuitously tracked down – shows distinct formal parallels with Carrington’s extraordinary self- portrait, started at about the same time. In Snead’s work, a nude figure sits among verdant foliage, flanked by two cats and a snake; her outstretched hand mirrors that of Carrington’s heroine, who sits in a sparse tiled room, a strange hyena-like creature by her side, a rocking horse on the wall behind her and a white horse galloping freely in a forest outside the ornate gold curtains.
One of the few paintings in the show actually made at Ozenfant’s school is “Jacob’s Ladder Dream” (1936) by Anne Saïd, latterly an important figure in Cairo’s modernist movement: a towering ladder reaches ominously into a dark sky and out beyond the frame. Charcoal and graphite studies of hands, feet and dancing bodies attest to the influence of Ozenfant’s emphasis on life drawing, but there’s a sense that all these artists made their most interesting work after leaving the academy. Dienes is a case in point. After separating from Ozenfant, she found her voice among downtown New York’s avant-garde: John Cage and Merce Cunningham, Isamu Noguchi, Yoko Ono, Jasper Johns. Leaving her technical training behind, she navigated a long career of restless experimentation across a gamut of modern media, creating daring performances, assemblages, musical environments, set designs and works made from rubbings of the city’s sidewalks. In an interview in 1980, Dienes made what can easily be read as a barbed rejection of Ozenfant’s exacting training: “Technique can be taught, but knowing the human anatomy will not make you a better artist”.
Darwent’s account of the school ends on an abject note: “Numbers 170–172 Warwick Road no longer exist, and there is nothing to show that they ever did”. One fascinating document that does survive is Ozenfant’s diary of 1936–9, which appears as a substantial appendix to Darwent’s book. Suddenly the artist comes to life as an anxious outsider learning the codes of London society: pacing the streets admiring English gothic architecture, with its “ethereality of dreams”; visiting the Tate to examine the Turner watercolours (“this Michelangelo of mist and fog”); and wandering through Hyde Park to pay respects at the house where the exiled Haile Selassie was staying. Ozenfant, as Darwent explains, spent these years mired in parallel battles: to finish his epic painting “Vie” and to achieve recognition from the French government for his work. The longstanding political chaos in France was compounded when General Franco launched his coup against the Spanish Republic in July 1936, supported by the French right-wing press. “They reignite old religious and racial hatreds”, Ozenfant raged, “spit outrage and provocation with a perplexing baseness and idiocy… a new politics has unleashed a collective and criminal hatred.” Following the civil war in Spain from a distance, he noted a “growing indifference to the sufferings of others”. Art, his diary suggests, might enable “the possibility of the opposite” to emerge.
He was eager to showcase and advance French art in England, and wrote often to the cultural wing of the French foreign ministry, advertising the “propaganda” potential of his school, which duly received some “modest but useful” grants from the Front Populaire. But his hopes – new buildings for the academy, exhibitions of his own work in France – tended to be dashed, often thwarted by the conservative ambassador Charles Corbin, who treated him as a nemesis. Ozenfant persisted with his efforts to bring painting to the people: in December 1937, he bravely participated in a live painting lesson broadcast on the BBC, in which he made versions of a still life in realist, cubist and purist styles. The following summer, he finally finished “Vie”, the vision of humanity in harmony with the earth on which he had been working for seven years. “Was the work worth all that effort? May I never know! Freedom, but emptiness.” Corbin blocked it from being displayed at the Tate and it now rests in the Centre Pompidou’s storage facility.
The story might have ended there, the painting forgotten and his teaching largely unrecorded. Yet 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’s latest book is Gertrude Stein: An afterlife, 2025
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