Fernand Léger

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The title of this article contains the character é. Where it is unavailable or not desired, the name

may be represented as Fernand Leger.

Fernand Léger

Fernand Léger photographed by Carl Van Vechten,

1936

Born February 4, 1881

Argentan, Orne

Died August 17, 1955 (aged 74)

Gif-sur-Yvette

Nationality French

Field painting, printmaking and film maker

Movement Tubism, Cubism, Modernism

Joseph Fernand Henri Léger (February 4, 1881 – August 17, 1955) was a French painter,

sculptor, and filmmaker. In his early works he created a personal form of Cubism which he

gradually modified into a more figurative, populist style. His boldly simplified treatment of

modern subject matter has caused him to be regarded as a forerunner of Pop Art.

Contents

[hide]

1 Biography

2 Legacy

3 Notes

4 References

5 External links

[edit] Biography

Still Life with a Beer Mug, 1921, oil on canvas, the Tate

Léger was born in the Argentan, Orne, Basse-Normandie, where his father raised cattle. Fernand

Léger initially trained as an architect from 1897–1899 before moving in 1900 to Paris, where he

supported himself as an architectural draftsman. After military service in Versailles in 1902–

1903, he enrolled at the School of Decorative Arts; he also applied to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts

but was rejected. He nevertheless attended the Beaux-Arts as a non-enrolled student, spending

what he described as "three empty and useless years" studying with Gérôme and others, while

also studying at the Académie Julian.[1]

He began to work seriously as a painter only at the age of

25. At this point his work showed the influence of Impressionism, as seen in Le Jardin de ma

mère (My Mother's Garden) of 1905, one of the few paintings from this period that he did not

later destroy. A new emphasis on drawing and geometry appeared in Léger's work after he saw

the Cézanne retrospective at the Salon d'Automne in 1907.[2]

In 1909 he moved to Montparnasse and met such leaders of the avant-garde as Archipenko,

Lipchitz, Chagall, and Robert Delaunay. His major painting of this period is Nudes in the Forest

(1909–10), in which Léger displayed a personal form of Cubism—his critics called it "Tubism"

for its emphasis on cylindrical forms—that made no use of the collage technique pioneered by

Braque and Picasso.[3]

The City, 1919, oil on canvas, The Museum of Modern Art, New York

In 1910 he joined with several other artists, including Delaunay, Jacques Villon, Henri Le

Fauconnier, Albert Gleizes, Francis Picabia, and Marie Laurencin to form an offshoot of the

Cubist movement, the Puteaux Group—also called the Section d'Or (The Golden Section). Léger

was influenced during this time by Italian Futurism, and his paintings, from then until 1914,

became increasingly abstract. Their tubular, conical, and cubed forms are laconically rendered in

rough patches of primary colors plus green, black and white, as seen in the series of paintings

with the title Contrasting Forms.

Léger's experiences in World War I had a significant effect on his work. Mobilized in August

1914 for service in the French Army, he spent two years at the front in Argonne. He produced

many sketches of artillery pieces, airplanes, and fellow soldiers while in the trenches, and

painted Soldier with a Pipe (1916) while on furlough. In September 1916 he almost died after a

mustard gas attack by the German troops at Verdun. During a period of convalescence in

Villepinte he painted The Card Players (1917), a canvas whose robot-like, monstrous figures

reflect the ambivalence of his experience of war. As he explained:

...I was stunned by the sight of the breech of a 75 millimeter in the sunlight. It was the magic of

light on the white metal. That's all it took for me to forget the abstract art of 1912–1913. The

crudeness, variety, humor, and downright perfection of certain men around me, their precise

sense of utilitarian reality and its application in the midst of the life-and-death drama we were in

... made me want to paint in slang with all its color and mobility.[4]

This painting marked the beginning of his "mechanical period", during which the figures and

objects he created were characterized by sleekly rendered tubular and machine-like forms.

Starting in 1918, he also produced the first paintings in the Disk series, in which disks suggestive

of traffic lights figure prominently.[5]

In December 1919 he married Jeanne-Augustine Lohy, and

in 1920 he met Le Corbusier, who would remain a lifelong friend.

The Railway Crossing, 1919, oil on canvas, 53.8 x 64.8 cm, The Art Institute of Chicago

The "mechanical" works Léger painted in the 1920s, in their formal clarity as well as in their

subject matter—the mother and child, the female nude, figures in an ordered landscape—are

typical of the postwar "return to order" in the arts, and link him to the tradition of French

figurative painting represented by Poussin and Corot.[6]

In his paysages animés (animated

landscapes) of 1921, figures and animals exist harmoniously in landscapes made up of

streamlined forms. The frontal compositions, firm contours, and smoothly blended colors of

these paintings frequently recall the works of Henri Rousseau, an artist Léger greatly admired

and whom he had met in 1909.

They also share traits with the work of Le Corbusier and Amédée Ozenfant who together had

founded Purism, a style intended as a rational, mathematically based corrective to the

impulsiveness of cubism. Combining the classical with the modern, Léger's Nude on a Red

Background (1927) depicts a monumental, expressionless woman, machinelike in form and

color. His still life compositions from this period are dominated by stable, interlocking

rectangular formations in vertical and horizontal orientation. The Siphon of 1924, a still life

based on an advertisement in the popular press for the aperitif Campari, represents the high-

water mark of the Purist aesthetic in Léger's work.[7]

Its balanced composition and fluted shapes

suggestive of classical columns are brought together with a quasi-cinematic close-up of a hand

holding a bottle.

Fernand Léger (sitting) with Ken Nack in Paris in 1950

As an enthusiast of the modern, Léger was greatly attracted to cinema, and for a time he

considered giving up painting for filmmaking.[8]

In 1923–24 he designed the set for the

laboratory scene in Marcel L'Herbier's L'Inhumaine (The Inhuman One). In 1924, in

collaboration with Dudley Murphy, George Antheil, and Man Ray, Léger produced and directed

the iconic and Futurism-influenced film, Ballet Mécanique (Mechanical Ballet). Neither abstract

nor narrative, it is a series of images of a woman's lips and teeth, close-up shots of ordinary

objects, and repeated images of human activities and machines in rhythmic movement.[9]

In collaboration with Amédée Ozenfant he established a free school where he taught from 1924,

with Alexandra Exter and Marie Laurencin. He produced the first of his "mural paintings",

influenced by Le Corbusier's theories, in 1925. Intended to be incorporated into polychrome

architecture, they are among his most abstract paintings, featuring flat areas of color that appear

to advance or recede.[10]

Starting in 1927, the character of Léger's work gradually changed as organic and irregular forms

assumed greater importance.[11]

The figural style that emerged in the 1930s is fully displayed in

the Two Sisters of 1935, and in several versions of Adam and Eve.[12]

With characteristic humor,

he portrayed Adam in a striped bathing suit, or sporting a tattoo.

In 1931, Leger visited New York City and decorated Nelson Rockefeller's apartment.[13]

In 1935,

the Museum of Modern Art in New York City presented an exhibition of his work.

During World War II Léger lived in the United States, where he found inspiration in the novel

sight of industrial refuse in the landscape. The shock of juxtaposed natural forms and mechanical

elements, the "tons of abandoned machines with flowers cropping up from within, and birds

perching on top of them" exemplified what he called the "law of contrast".[14]

His enthusiasm for

such contrasts resulted in such works as The Tree in the Ladder of 1943–44, and Romantic

Landscape of 1946. A major work of 1944, Three Musicians (Museum of Modern Art, New

York), reprises a composition of 1930. A folk-like composition reminiscent of Rousseau, it

exploits the law of contrasts in its realistic juxtaposition of the three men and their instruments.

Stained-glass window at the Central University of Venezuela, c.1950s

Upon his return to France in 1945, he joined the Communist Party. During this period his work

became less abstract, and he produced many monumental figure compositions depicting scenes

of popular life featuring acrobats, builders, divers, and country outings. Art historian Charlotta

Kotik has written that Leger's "determination to depict the common man, as well as to create for

him, was a result of socialist theories widespread among the avant-garde both before and after

World War II. However, Léger's social conscience was not that of a fierce Marxist, but of a

passionate humanist".[15]

His varied projects included book illustrations, murals, stained-glass

windows, mosaics, polychrome ceramic sculptures, and set and costume designs.

After the death of his wife in 1950, Léger married Nadia Khodossevitch in 1952. In his final

years he lectured in Bern, designed mosaics and stained-glass windows for the Central

University of Venezuela in Caracas, Venezuela, and painted Country Outing, The Camper, and

the series The Big Parade. In 1954 he began a project for a mosaic for the São Paulo Opera,

which he would not live to finish. Fernand Léger died at his home in 1955 and is buried in Gif-

sur-Yvette, Essonne.

[edit] Legacy

Léger wrote in 1945 that "the object in modern painting must become the main character and

overthrow the subject. If, in turn, the human form becomes an object, it can considerably liberate

possibilities for the modern artist." As he explained in a 1949 essay, by allowing the object to

replace the subject, "we were able to consider the human figure as a plastic value, not as a

sentimental value. That is why the human figure has remained willfully inexpressive throughout

the evolution of my work".[16]

As the first painter to take as his idiom the imagery of the machine

age, and to make the objects of consumer society the subjects of his paintings, Léger has been

called a progenitor of Pop art.[17]

He was active as a teacher for many years. Among his pupils were Nadir Afonso, Robert

Colescott, Charlotte Gilbertson, Hananiah Harari, Asger Jorn, Michael Loew, Beverly Pepper,

Victor Reinganum, Marcel Mouly, George L. K. Morris and Charlotte Wankel.

In 1952, a pair of Léger murals was installed in the General Assembly Hall of the United Nations

headquarters in New York, New York. [18]

In 1960, the Musée Fernand Léger was opened in Biot, Alpes-Maritimes,France.

In November 2003, his painting, La femme en rouge et vert sold for $22,407,500 United States

dollars. Sales prices of his sculptures have exceeded 8 million dollars.

In August 2008, one of Léger's paintings owned by Wellesley College's Davis Museum, Mother

and Child, was reported missing. It is believed to have disappeared some time between April 9,

2007 and November 19, 2007. A $100,000 reward is being offered for information that leads to

the safe return of the painting.