Amédée Ozenfant

Léonce Rosenberg, Paris

Galerie des États-Unis (Serge Stoliar), Cannes (acquired by 1968)

Herment Collection, Nice 

Hôtel Rameau, Versailles, 12 March 1972, lot 135

Acquired by 1981 the present owner

Paris, Galerie Jeanne Castel, Ozenfant, 1930 (titled Nocturne Goethien) 

Paris, Palais de la Découverte, Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques, 1937 

Cagnes, Château-Musée, Amédée Ozenfant, 1964

S. John Woods, “The Works of Ozenfant,” Decoration, no. 11, March 1936, p. 33, illustrated (titled Nocturne Goethien)

Amédée Ozenfant, Mémoires, 1886-1962, Paris, 1968, p. 147

Exh. Cat., Saint-Quentin, Musée Antoine Lécuyer; Mulhouse, Musée des Beaux-Arts; Besançon Musée des Beaux-Arts, (and traveling), Amédée Ozenfant, 1985-86, no. 97, p. 113, illustrated 

Pierre Guénégan and Marie Guénégan, Amédée Ozenfant, 1886-1966, Catalogue raisonné de l'oeuvre peint, London, 2012, no. 1929/034, p. 436, illustrated in color

A striking testament to Amédée Ozenfant’s intellectual and artistic evolution, Nocturne faustien from 1929 marks a pivot away from the clarity of Purism toward metaphysical and symbolic inquiry rooted in cosmology, mysticism and the Faustian mythos. Here, the artist weaves a visual poem of celestial mechanics, scientific precision and allegory—an art that, as critic S. John Woods observed in 1936, rests upon “geometry—the keynote to Ozenfant, as man, as artist, as writer” (Decoration, no. 11, March 1936, p. 33). Nocturne faustien thus stands at the threshold between order and imagination, reason and reverie.

Nocturne faustien bears the legacy of Ozenfant’s early commitment to Purism—a movement he co-founded with Le Corbusier in the wake of the First World War. Their manifesto Après le Cubisme (1918), and the journal L’Esprit Nouveau (1920-25), championed an art of rational form and clarity inspired by industrial design and scientific optimism. By the late 1920s, however, Ozenfant had begun to move beyond Purism’s doctrinaire rigor toward a more speculative visual language attuned to spiritual and cosmological questions.

In Nocturne faustien, he transforms Purist discipline into a theatre of metaphysical inquiry. The composition unites coiled tubing, distillation flasks, a telescope-like cylinder, a luminous globe and scattered stars. At its center, a glass vessel shelters a tiny embryonic figure—an unmistakable reference to Goethe’s Faust II, in which the Homunculus is created in a laboratory. This allusion, underscored by the work’s alternate title Nocturne Goethien, frames the scene as both modern experiment and timeless allegory.

While the painting’s compositional rigor recalls his Purist past, its imagery introduces new layers of ambiguity. The gleaming coils and glass spheres function simultaneously as laboratory instruments and cosmic symbols, evoking both scientific transformation and eternal recurrence. The looping distillation tube suggests chemical processes and the ouroboric cycle of rebirth, binding rational order to metaphysical meaning. Suspended in a dark sky, these instruments appear weightless, intersected by a diagonal beam of light that unites the empirical with the celestial.

In this balanced system, Ozenfant stages the Faustian act of creation as a modern allegory of artistic experiment—the painter as scientist. His union of mechanical clarity and visionary subject matter situates him within a broader current of late Purist experimentation: between 1927 and 1930, artists such as Jean Metzinger, Marcelle Cahn and Fernand Léger began to incorporate cosmological and alchemical references into their work, transforming the rationalism of Purism into a more poetic visual language. Ozenfant’s exploration of this new symbolic geometry resonates with contemporaries such as Victor Servranckx and László Moholy-Nagy, who likewise translated the vocabulary of machinery and optics into a modern visual poetry, as seen in works like Servranckx’s Opus 57, which reimagines industrial architecture as rhythmic abstraction, and Moholy-Nagy’s Photograms, where light itself becomes a creative instrument.

The scientific imagery in Nocturne faustien reflects the spirit of discovery that defined the late 1920s, when astronomy and quantum physics were reshaping humanity’s vision of the cosmos. For Ozenfant—whose Purist doctrine had already likened painting to “a laboratory of forms”—science provided both method and metaphor: a disciplined pursuit of order through observation. As Françoise Ducros notes, he belonged to “a generation seeking a spiritual response opposed to the rise of materialism brought on by growing industrialization and scientific progress… aware that this new scientific idolatry probably would bring no answers to human distress” (Amédée Ozenfant, Paris, 2002, p. 133).

In Nocturne faustien, scientific imagery becomes a metaphor for creation itself. The laboratory setting—glass, light, and calibrated form—echoes visual languages emerging from photography and scientific illustration in the late 1920s. Fascinated by photography’s ability to reveal hidden structures within the ordinary, Ozenfant saw it as a parallel to painting’s analytical power. Photography, he observed, allowed him “to rediscover in reality the visual expression of verticals, horizontals, curves, and their neutralization,” creating a “plastic system” that revealed the world’s underlying forces and their effects on humanity (ibid., pp. 133-37).

Ozenfant’s work thus aligns with the broader current of réalisme magique—the “spiritual rationalism” of the interwar years that sought to reconcile technological progress with metaphysical inquiry. In Nocturne faustien, the laboratory becomes a cosmos in miniature; its glass vessels and beams of light serve not as instruments of experiment but of revelation.

His dialogue between science and spirit finds resonance with Wassily Kandinsky, whose theoretical text in Point and Line to Plane from 1926 proposed a “science of art” extending “beyond the confines of art into the oneness of the human and the divine.” Kandinsky’s Several Circles, from 1926, evokes planetary and atomic systems, visualizing unseen laws of order. Ozenfant shares this cosmic ambition, though expressed through tangible apparatus and experiment. His globes and flasks correspond to Kandinsky’s points and lines; his radiant coils and beams transform the laboratory into an image of universal harmony. As art critic and first director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim museum Hilla von Rebay observed, Kandinsky “ceased to be satisfied with representation… but felt more and more the desire to express his inner life in a cosmic organization” (preface to Point and Line to Plane, pp. 11-12)—a phrase that might equally describe Nocturne faustien: a synthesis of intellect and intuition, where experiment becomes creation and matter yields to spirit.

Ozenfant painted two versions of Nocturne faustien in 1929; the pendant work, also known as Le Monde entier, echoes the scientific and cosmic motifs of the present canvas though in a different chromatic register. In his Mémoires, he wrote that “my old interest in astronomy and the physics of universal forces was finally influencing my painting: our present is often made from the slow integration of our past,” giving rise to “the two Nocturnes faustiens” (Mémoires, 1968, p. 147). These twin paintings underscore his engagement with the Faustian myth as an allegory for the modern creative intellect—exploring the boundaries between human reason and divine aspiration.

First handled by Léonce Rosenberg, the present work was exhibited at the Palais de la Découverte during the 1937 Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne, where it hung in a gallery devoted to the unity of scientific discovery and artistic imagination. Conceived by Nobel laureate Jean Perrin as a “living exhibition” in which experiments in physics, chemistry, and astronomy unfolded before the public, the Palais celebrated what Perrin described as “a disinterested effort, pursued for its purely intellectual and artistic value, [that] leads to marvels that only the mind could conceive” (Discours d’inauguration du Palais de la Découverte, in Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne, Paris, 1937, p. 12). Surrounded by displays on electromagnetism, optics, and cosmic phenomena, Ozenfant’s painting—bridging laboratory imagery and metaphysical symbolism—resonated profoundly with this vision of modern science as a new humanist art.

Held in the same private collection for more than forty years, Nocturne faustien presents a rare example of the artist’s mature synthesis of intellect and imagination at the close of the 1920s. Uniting Purist discipline with metaphysical inquiry and literary inspiration, Nocturne faustien transforms the laboratory into a cosmos of creation—where geometry becomes both method and metaphor. In this luminous equilibrium of science and spirit, Ozenfant reveals his conviction that art, like experiment, seeks order within mystery.