Monsieur Ozenfant's Academy

Charles Darwent is an art critic and author. He contributes regularly to The Guardian, The Art Newspaper and Art Review, and was the chief art critic for the Independent on Sunday from 1999–2013. He appeared on the Netflix series Raiders of the Lost Art from 2014–2016. He is the author of Surrealists in New York (2023), Josef Albers: Life and Work (2018), and Mondrian in London: How British Art Nearly Became Modern (2012).

“[Darwent] paints a portrait of Ozenfant the man, the artist, the cultural emissary that’s quietly illuminating.”—Chloë Ashby, Times (UK)“Leaves one fond of Ozenfant and grateful to Darwent for retrieving him from obscurity.”—Will Wiles, Literary Review“Ozenfant, friend and collaborator of Le Corbusier and Fernand Léger—and co-founder of Purism (a restrained and very French strain of modern art) that manifested itself in his hands as a crisply architectural form of cubism—has now been resurrected by the estimable Charles Darwent, a sage writer on mid-century art. As well as a diverting account of Ozenfant’s life in Paris, London and New York, Darwent includes his own translation of the diary entries Ozenfant kept during his London sojourn that contain a mixture of picaresque views on the darkening politics of the time and his own life as a cultural emissary.”—Michael Prodger, New Statesman“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, Times Literary Supplement