Monsieur Ozenfant’s Academy opens with an absence – the sort of absence that might have proved fatal to a book written by a less determined author. In his preface, Charles Darwent lists his fruitless searches of various archives and institutions for information on his subject: an art school established in 1930s London by the French artist Amédée Ozenfant. This paucity of sources haunts the book, and Darwent repeatedly makes his frustrations known. Where recollections do exist, he finds they are often contradictory or erroneous. 

Ozenfant is more or less forgotten today. In his time, however, he was influential and well connected. In 1918 he launched an artistic movement called Purism with a little-known Swiss architect called Charles-Edouard Jeanneret. It was Ozenfant who suggested the pseudonym that Jeanneret adopted: Le Corbusier. After falling out with Le Corbusier, and the closure of the journal the two men had founded, Ozenfant took to teaching. He may have taught Francis Bacon – Bacon certainly had Ozenfant’s book Foundations of Modern Art and reproduced one of its images (a distorted photograph of the politician Sir Austen Chamberlain) in his work. The Ozenfant Academy of Fine Arts was established in Kensington, London, in 1936 with the help of Ursula Blackwell, a member of the family that co-founded the Crosse & Blackwell pickle firm and wife of the modernist architect Ernő Goldfinger. Its most famous confirmed alumnus was the surrealist painter Leonora Carrington. Henry Moore briefly taught sculpture there. But everything about the school was brief: it closed in 1939, as the Second World War loomed. 

Purism was intended as a way of uniting the rigours of classicism with the modernity of the machine age. Flat planes of colour were combined with a highly symbolic visual language. Its most famous adherent was Fernand Léger. At the Ozenfant Academy, this slightly chilly left-brain philosophy of art existed alongside a dictatorial regime. Students were instructed in drawing with unforgiving hard pencils and giant sheets of paper, and encouraged towards exactness of line – sketching was a dirty word. They drew the same model, who held the same pose for two weeks. The actress Dulcie Gray, who attended the school, recalled that in the winter, the side of the model nearest the stove turned scarlet, while the other side was blue with cold. If the morning’s drawings passed muster, students were permitted to paint. A chart on the wall showed the colours they were allowed to use; the paint was to be applied according to an approved technique which yielded a consistent finish. 

Nevertheless, Ozenfant inspired great loyalty and affection among his students. Indeed, his enthusiastic, sanguine character is one of the most appealing aspects of the story Darwent tells and helps explain why he stuck with the subject through all those disappointing hunts in the archives. It’s also notable that many graduates of the school – most notably Carrington – did not become Purists. (Very few people ever did.) The purpose of Purism was to apply the lessons of mass production to the making of art, systematising it into a scheme of simple, reproducible ‘object types’. The school did not teach form but rather outline and shape. This proved to be a fairly solid – and not overly constrictive – basis for artistic education. ‘Even when a rule is completely inverted, that is better than total absence of method,’ Ozenfant wrote. ‘Art is not a game of chance (where one nearly always loses).’ Once Purism had been learned, it could be discarded. 

But Ozenfant wanted education to accomplish more. He dreamed of using art to foster friendship between the United Kingdom and France in the face of rising fascism. He sought government funds to establish a permanent French school of painting in London. The pioneering architect Oscar Nitzchke produced designs for a multi-storey building of startling modernity to house this institution. An exhibition would tour the country by boat. There are tantalising hints that the cultural department of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs entertained the idea, but such an exercise in Anglo–French artistic collaboration was not to be.

This intriguing tale of interwar soft power, and the light it sheds on avant-garde artistic life at the time, gives an extra dimension to Darwent’s book. Ozenfant’s Anglophilia is another of his endearing qualities. He regarded Turner as the wellspring of modern art, the essential precursor of Monet (heresy for a Frenchman). He admired the English capacity for reinvention and assimilation, and the syncretic nature of English identity. Ronald and Charlotte Morris, a somewhat enigmatic couple who had been instrumental in enticing the artist to London, were English archetypes for Ozenfant – Ronald was the descendant of Jewish immigrants from the Russian Empire. On occasions, when he felt he had grown used to London, a city he loved, he recited its name to himself: ‘London! LONDON! This round word, which I have so often said to myself when I wanted it to come to me, this sweet sound brings back to life the delights of my early days here.’

This last quote is taken from the succinct diary Ozenfant kept while in London, which Darwent has translated and reproduces in the last quarter of this short book. It is an idiosyncratic and charming document, and leaves one fond of Ozenfant and grateful to Darwent for retrieving him from obscurity.