FERNAND LEGER 1881 - 1955

Joseph Fernand Henri Léger was born February 4, 1881, in Argentan, France. After apprenticing with an architect in Caen from 1897 to 1899, Léger settled in Paris in 1900 and supported himself as an architectural draftsman. He was refused entrance to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts but nevertheless attended classes there beginning in 1903; he also studied at the Académie Julian. Léger’s earliest known works, which date from 1905, were primarily influenced by Impressionism. The experience of seeing the Paul Cézanne retrospective at the Salon d’Automne in 1907 and his contact with the early Cubism of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque had an extremely significant impact on the development of his personal style. In 1911 he joined with several other artists to form the Puteaux Group, an offshoot of the Cubist movement. From 1911 to 1914, Léger’s work became increasingly abstract, and he started to limit his color to the primaries and black and white. In 1912, he was given his first solo show at Galerie Kahnweiler, Paris.

Léger served in the military from 1914 to 1917. After having been gassed during the First World War, he was discharged in 1917 and became a close friend of Le Corbusier and Amédée Ozenfant. He collaborated with Ozenfant in the Atelier Libre and in 1925 he exhibited at Le Corbusier`s Pavilion de I`Esprit Nouveau.

His “mechanical” period, in which figures and objects are characterized by tubular, machinelike forms, began in 1917. During the early 1920s, he collaborated with the writer Blaise Cendrars on films and designed sets and costumes for performances by Rolf de Maré’s Ballets Suédois; in 1924, he completed his first film without a plot, Ballet mécanique. Léger opened an atelier with Amédée Ozenfant in 1924 and in 1925 presented his first murals at Le Corbusier’s Pavillon de l’Esprit Nouveau at the Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs.

In 1925 also he did mural decorations in collaboration with Robert Delaunay for the entry hall of the exhibition Les Arts Décoratifs. During his collaboration with the leaders of the Purist movement his works exemplified the "machine aesthetic" which Purism exemplified. His paintings were static, with the precise and polished appearance of machinery, and he had a strong inclination for including representations of mechanical parts.

It was during the late 1920’s and 1930’s that he also painted single objects isolated in space and sometimes amplified to gigantic size. He also produced theatrical decors, especially for the Swedish Ballets, and worked with the cinema. His "Ballet Mechanic" (1934) was the first film without a script.

In 1931, he visited the United States for the first time. In 1935, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Art Institute of Chicago presented an exhibition of his work. Léger lived in the United States from 1940 to 1945 but returned to France after the war. In the decade before his death, Léger’s wide-ranging projects included book illustrations, monumental figure paintings and murals, stained-glass windows, mosaics, polychrome ceramic sculptures, and set and costume designs. In 1955, he won the Grand Prize at the São Paulo Bienal. Léger died August 17 of that year, at his home in Gif-sur-Yvette, Essonne, France and is buried in the Cimetière de Gif-sur-Yvette, France. The Musée Fernand Léger was inaugurated in 1960 in Biot, France.

ADDITIONAL INSIGHT INTO LEGER'S ART

While living in the United States, Léger taught at Yale University briefly before returning to Paris in 1945. His large paintings celebrating the people, featuring acrobats, cyclists and builders, thickly contoured and painted in clear, flat colours, reflected his political interest in the working class, and his attempt to create accessible art. From 1946 to 1949 he worked on a mosaic for the facade of the church at Assy, produced windows and tapestries for the church at Ardincourt in 1951, as well as windows for the University of Caracas in 1954. In 1950 he founded a ceramics studio at Biot, which, in 1957, became the Léger Museum. In 1967 it became a national museum. Léger was one of the giants of French painting this century, whose influence has been almost as great as his reputation. His works are now rated between US $60,000 and $2 million.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION REGARDING LEGER'S "MECHANICAL BALLET"

"I like the forms necessitated by modern industry and I use them; a smelting furnace will have thousands of colored reflections both more subtle and more solid than a supposedly classical subject. I consider that a machine gun or the breech of a 75 is more worth painting than four apples on a table or a Saint Cloud landscape," wrote Léger in a 1922 letter.

Of all the Cubists, Léger was the most in touch with the real world. His work embraced the everyday subjects of mass culture, whether early abstractions of propellers and disks or ambitious late canvases of workers up on the high iron of skyscrapers. No nudes in the studio, or bohemians in the cafe for Léger

Léger was the subject of a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1998, a condensed version of an exhibition that appeared earlier that year in Paris. MoMA last presented a Léger show in 1955, as a memorial thrown together days after the artist's sudden death.

Born in the countryside of northwestern France to a family of cattle breeders in 1881, Léger was steered into architecture by his parents, who thought it a safer career choice than painting. But soon he was in Paris at the prestigious Academy Julian. In 1908 he moved into the famous artist's building, La Ruche (The Beehive) and made the vital friendships with the great names of the day: Brancusi, Archipenko, Lipschitz, Chagall, Robert Delaunay.

By 1911 he had transformed the Cubism of Braque and Picasso into an idiom uniquely his own -- one based firmly in 20th-century life. Unlike the other Cubists, Léger was not interested in traditional subjects like the still life and the portrait -- instead he painted the city in all its glory and tawdriness. His great idea to combat unemployment in Paris was to offer the suggestion "that all walls be whitewashed by the unemployed at one and the same time," thereby potentially setting into motion the very first "performance art."

A pivotal painting of this period is Exit the Ballets Russes (1914). It takes its inspiration from Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase of l912, but Leger uses the strong primary colors of modern advertising and posters, rather than the more subtle duns and tones found in the typical Cubist palette. Léger's insistence on a volumetric Cubism, too, seems a direct link to the machined geometry that characterizes modern life.

During World War I, Léger was drafted into the French Army, which turned out to be a revelation. He felt close not only to the machinery of war, but also to his fellow soldiers, who he celebrated in The Card Game (1917). Here are the helmeted soldiers in cylindrical form, indicating shell casings and artillery pieces smoking their inevitable pipes. The soldiers' fingers are presented in the form of fork tines, their cat eyes blinking at the uncertain future.

Léger's celebration of the common people was to be later elaborated in his great canvases of workers, picnics and circuses. One of his few essays into the typical artistic subject, however, can be seen in Three Women or Le Grand Déjeuner (1921). Even here he renders the human form in terms of machinery, as cylinders and sheet metal constructions rather than flesh and blood creatures. Only the long black hair and the far-away eyes provide the human element. The breasts of the three nudes suggest nothing so much as ball bearings.

Ball Bearings (1926) is the most dramatic painting in his series celebrating everyday objects. It is characterized by strong black borders, rich deep colors and the visual center showing the casing holding eight bearing balls. When questioned Léger stated firmly that "he could see beauty in the arrangements of a set of pots on a white kitchen wall."

Another key image of the period is The Syphon (1924), a Purist painting inspired by a Dubonnet poster. Colorful and precise, the painting shows a firm male hand aiming the syphon into a cocktail beaker while a scale and a variety of cylindrical and vertical shapes provide the backdrop.

During this period he also began to branch out into the theatrical arts. He provided sets for the ballets Skating Rink based on the music of Arthur Honegger and La Creation du Monde by Darius Milhaud. He also produced and directed one of the first silent movie features. Interestingly, actual objects were used rather than drawings of objects.

When Léger first visited the U.S. in 1931, he raved about the colors, vibrancy and lights of New York. He returned a number of times, staying during the Nazi period. From this period comes the sober, neo-classic painting of Three Musicians (after a drawing dated 1924-25), that also resides at MoMA. Those who view Leger's people only as automatons will discover his warmth in this 1944 painting.

Léger's greatest painting is arguably The Great Parade (1954) at the Guggenheim. The "great parade" is traditionally the procession through town of acrobats, clowns, dancers and riders that announces the arrival of the circus. The circus and its performers are standard fare for French artists and many have immortalized the images, including Daumier, Seurat, Rouault and of course we must not forget Picasso's Saltimbaques. Léger's sketches for Great Parade go back to 1919. They were recast many times until Léger was satisfied. This painting more than any other sums up the work of this great French artist whose humanity, warmth and joyous renditions of "everyman" and our modern times have enriched us all.


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