Amédée Ozenfant

Earth takes four of his ten planets, with two apiece in fire, air and water, and five of the ten are mutable with only one fixed. The Moon, Mars and Jupiter spread across twenty two degrees of Virgo. The record says Ozenfant founded Purism with Le Corbusier and wrote its manifesto.

This is a loose chart. Only one contact in it comes inside half a degree, and that one is the Sun in mild friction with Venus at just over a quarter, which is the hardest angle those two can ever make, since Venus never separates far enough from the Sun to square it. The reading is a mild version of the fusion, with taste and self-worth slightly out of step rather than genuinely at odds, and in a painter that is about as much and as little as it sounds.

The next contact out is the interesting one. The Moon lies at an awkward angle to Mercury at just over a degree, what is felt and what is said pulling apart, which the reading describes as the specific frustration of not being able to explain something that is perfectly clear internally. In a painter who wrote the manifesto for his own movement, that is a pointed thing for a chart to offer, because writing the manifesto is the act of somebody who believed the explaining could be done. The chart and the record disagree here, and the manifesto exists.

The Sun sits in quiet contact with Neptune at a degree and a quarter, imagination available without cost: creative facility, and a natural, undramatic kind of empathy. The Moon sits a fifth of a turn from Saturn at a degree and a third, emotional steadiness, and its sign is certain at fourteen degrees of Virgo, which settles a feeling by finding a task. Mercury, Mars, Jupiter and Uranus were the four retrograde planets. He died at Cannes on 4 May 1966, at eighty. The transiting Sun stood in easy contact with his natal Moon at just over a fifth of a degree that day, and the Moon was one hundred per cent lit, carrying the phase reading that refines, questions and improves, and rarely calls anything finished.