Amédée Ozenfant

Amédée Ozenfant (15 April 1886 – 4 May 1966) was a French cubist painter and writer. Together with Charles-Edouard Jeanneret (later known as Le Corbusier) he founded the Purist movement.

Ozenfant was born into a bourgeois family in Saint-Quentin, Aisne and was educated at Dominican colleges in Saint-Sébastien. After completing his education he returned to Saint-Quentin and began painting in watercolour and pastels.

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 1905 he began training in decorative arts in Paris, where his teachers were Maurice Pillard Verneuil and later Charles Cottet.

By 1907 he had enrolled in the Académie de La Palette, where he studied under Jacques-Emile Blanche. He befriended Roger de La Fresnaye and André Dunoyer de Segonzac, who were his fellow students. In 1908 he began exhibiting at the Salon de la Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, and two years later began exhibiting at the Salon d'Automne.