Esprit Nouveau

In 1918 Jeanneret and Ozenfant, with the support of some avant-garde colleagues but in reaction to others, published Après le Cubisme,²⁷ effectively the first manifesto for their own artistic movement: Purism. And on the flyleaf they announced a series of subsequent publications, notably one on architecture that they claimed (as we shall see, impossibly) already in press; that treatise, Vers une architecture (misleadingly translated into English as ‘Towards a new architecture’), would only appear in 1923, and then under Jeanneret’s new name alone: Le Corbusier.²⁸ Meanwhile, these theories would be propagated through other publications,²⁹ above all through their Modernist magazine L’Esprit Nouveau, which they launched in 1920 with the support of the writer Paul Dermée (1886–1951),³⁰ already experienced in editing avant-garde magazines,³¹ and the financial backing of subscribers encompassing practising artists and potential patrons. As the rubrics soon introduced for regular columns would indicate, the magazine would not only cover the arts – visual and performance arts, architecture and literature – but also science and (separately) ‘applied science’, économique sociologique, sport and aesthetics, the latter being considered as a philosophical – and even scientific – discipline.³² Le Corbusier’s famous architectural manifesto, Vers une architecture, in fact derived from the architectural articles in early issues of the magazine.

While esprit nouveau (‘new spirit’) was a common term at the time, it seems that they were referring to Apollinaire’s usage, as it appeared in Paris soon after Jeanneret (who had already met the poet within Voirol’s circle) settled there. Apollinaire’s essay ‘“Parade” et l’esprit nouveau’ appeared in a programme that Le Corbusier owned and – unusually for him – carefully preserved to the end of his life,³³ for Paris performances by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in May 1917. In discussing the company’s most avant-garde creation, ‘Parade’, which synthesised modern dance with sets by Picasso and music by Satie, it praised Picasso’s sets and referred to Cubism’s ‘esprit nouveau’, specifically because Apollinaire believed that Cubism had brought progress in art up to the level of that in the sciences and industry.³⁴

Finally, Apollinaire’s essay ‘L’Esprit nouveau et les poètes’ was ‘performed’ in a lecture-recital, the essay being ‘illustrated’ by poems read by actors, at the Théâtre du Vieux Colombier in late November that year,³⁵ and most probably attended by Jeanneret; it was published in Mercure de France the month after.³⁶ Here esprit nouveau was equated with ‘the spirit of the time in which we live, a time fertile in surprises’,³⁷ and was presented as ‘above all, the enemy of aestheticism, formulae and any snobbishness’ – evidently setting it up in opposition to the academies; indeed, this esprit nouveau had no intention to become a school but rather a great current encompassing all schools. ‘It fights for the re-establishment of the spirit of initiative, for the clear understanding of its time and for opening up new visions of the universes both outside us and within, visions no less than those that scholars of all kinds discover each day and from which they draw out wonders’.³⁸ Its principal characteristics were its search for truth, in ethics as well as in imagination,³⁹ such that the artist’s role in society was not only as creator but also as prophet.⁴⁰ While this ‘new spirit’ inherited the Romantics’ sense of curiosity, exploring any fields that could help it to enrich all modes of life, it did not cut itself off from the past. Above all, it inherited from ‘the classics’, ‘a solid common sense, an assured critical sense, holistic views of the universe and of the human soul, and a sense of duty’ that restrained the display of feelings⁴¹ (ideas with which Perret and his neo-Classically trained but Modernist-inclined colleagues would agree).⁴² Apollinaire criticised the excesses of Italian and Russian avant gardes, specifically as lacking the necessary sense of order, which, along with the ‘classical spirit’, he saw as virtues intrinsic to French culture. It was in fact, overall, a rather patriotically French manifesto, from one of the many immigrants within the artistic avant garde in Paris, and evidently had a profound influence upon that milieu, including Ozenfant and the Swiss émigré Jeanneret, but perhaps most particularly Apollinaire’s quasi-disciple, the Belgian émigré poet, Paul Dermée.