From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Fernand Léger
Fernand Léger photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1936
Born	February 4, 1881(1881-02-04) 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.

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 vocabulary of 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. Charlotta Kotik has pointed out 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.

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, Beverly Pepper, Victor Reinganum, Marcel Mouly and George L. K. Morris.

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

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. His sculptures have been selling in excess of 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.[2]

Notes

References

• Buck, Robert T. et al. (1982). Fernand Léger. New York: Abbeville Publishers. ISBN 0-89659-254-5
• Cowling, Elizabeth; Mundy, Jennifer (1990). On Classic Ground: Picasso, Léger, de Chirico and the New Classicism 1910-1930. London: Tate Gallery. ISBN 1-854-37043-X
• Eliel, Carol S. et al. (2001). L'Esprit Nouveau: Purism in Paris, 1918-1925. New York: Harry Abrams, Inc. ISBN 0-8109-6727-8
• Néret, Gilles (1993). F. Léger. New York: BDD Illustrated Books. ISBN 0-7924-5848-6

External links

• Artcyclopedia - Links to Léger's works
• Artchive - Biography and images of Léger's works
• Ballet Mecanique - Watch Fernand Léger's Short Film
• Paintings by Fernand Léger (public domain in Canada)

From Wikiquote

Joseph Fernand Henri Léger (February 4, 1881 – August 17, 1955) was a French painter, sculptor, and filmmaker. He started his art in early cubism and developed a style in which the human figure in relation to the modern times was his central aim to represent. He and his art was engaged with communism and with the worker's life.

Sourced quotes

• The concept of abstract painting) is not a passing abstraction, good only for a few initiates’, (but) ‘the total expression of a new generation whose necessities it experiences and to all of whose aspirations it constitutes a response. (1920)
  • Abstract Painting, Michel Seuphor, Dell Publishing Co., 1964, p. 16

• This mechanical element, which one is sorry to see disappear from the screen, and which one is impatient to see again, is discreet; it appears only at intervals, and far off, like a spotlight that flashes on in a long, intermittent, harrowing drama of totally uncompromising realism. The plastic event is non-the less there and seems to me be laden with consequences both in itself and for the future. (on the filming of Abel Gance’s La Roue, 1922)
  • Fernand Léger - The Later Years -, catalogue edited by Nicolas Serota, published by the Trustees of the Whitechapel Art gallery, London, Prestel Verlag, 1988, p. 21

• ..the personification of the close-up detail, the individualisation of the fragment, where the drama takes shape, moves and have it being. Film concurs with this aspect for life. The hand is a multiple, transformable object. Before I saw it in a film, I did not know what a hand was! The object in itself is capable of becoming an absolute, moving, tragic thing.
  • L'ésthetique de la Machine - l’Ordre Géometrique et le Vrai -, Propos d’Artistes, 1925

• I myself have employed the close-up, which is the cinema’s only real invention. The fragment of the object has also been of use to me; by isolating it you personalise it. All this work has led me to regard the phenomenon of objectivity as a new and highly contemporary value in itself. (around 1927)
  • Autour de Ballet Méchanique, as quoted in Fernand Léger - The Later Years -, catalogue edited by Nicolas Serota, published by the Trustees of the Whitechapel Art gallery, London, Prestel Verlag, 1988, pp. 21-22

• These new means (in the modern film, 1928, fh) have given us a new mentality. We want to see clearly, we want to understand mechanisms, functions, motors, down to their subtlest details. Composite wholes are no longer enough for us – we want to feel and grasp the details of those wholes – and we realise that these details, these fragments, if seen in isolation, have a complete and particular life of their own.. ..Close-ups in the cinema are a consecration of this new vision.. ..A shoe as beautiful as a picture. A picture as beautiful as an X-ray machine.
  • Actualités, Fernand Léger, in Varietés nr. 1, 1928, pp. 522-23

• The love of simplicity, precision and clarity, is totally Western. Today’s rational plastic form does not come from the Mediterranean or the Orient; it comes from the North (of France, fh). The North, younger, quicker less subtle, has seen straight to the heart of the new problem of construction that is posed by modern life.
  • Actualités, Fernand Léger, in Varietés nr. 1, 1928, pp. 523-524

• The age we live in is largely – and I think mostly – ‘objective’, but a minority is reacting against this .. ..My feeling is that I made colour –m the colour plane – ‘objective’ in 1918, 1920 and 1921. There is a feeling of objectivity in all the great Primitives- but in ‘the subject’ there is no solution for the object, which has so much intrinsic value that it is ‘’highly explosive’: it destroys all the things around it, unless they have been designed specifically to serve as a setting for it. (a letter to Simone Herman, 1933)
  • letter to Simone Herman, September 3, 1933, as in quoted Fernand Léger - The Later Years -, catalogue edited by Nicolas Serota, published by the Trustees of the Whitechapel Art gallery, London, Prestel Verlag, 1988, p. 28

• The essential is the object. Error consists in forgetting that grain, cotton, wool are vital objects and in being interested in them only because of their value in gold, their speculative value. The economic purpose is not ‘to make millionaires out of gasoline’ but to distribute gasoline according to demand and need. Wall street is an abstraction.
  • exhibition catalogue, John Becker Gallery, New York, March 1933

• An example: if I compose a picture using as objects a scrap of bark, a scrap of butterfly wing and a purely imaginary form, you probably won’t recognise the bark, or the butterfly wing, and you’ll say: ‘What does this stand for? It is an abstract picture. No it’s a representational picture’.. ..There is no such thing as ‘abstract’, or ‘concrete’ either. There is a good picture and a bad picture. There is the picture that moves you and the picture that leaves you cold.. ..A picture has a value in itself, like a musical score, like a poem.
  • Un Nouveau Realisme, la Couleur Pure et l’Object, Fernand Léger, Ms 1935

• Of the various plastic orientations developed over the past twenty-five years , abstract art is the most important, the most interesting… ..It is an extreme state which only a few creators and admirers are capable of achieving. The danger of this formula lies in the very elevation of its intention. Modelings, contrasts, objects have disappeared, leaving only very pure, very precise relations, and a few colors, a few lines; blank spaces, without depth. Add tot this a respect for the vertical plane – thin, rigid, sharp. It is a true, incorruptible purism.
  • publication of a text on abstract art, F. Léger, Montreal, 1945, Abstract Painting, Michel Seuphor, Dell Publishing Co., 1964

• It is a true, incorruptible purism.. ..It is a religion that can not be argued about. It has its saints, its disciples and its heretics. Modern life with its speed und tumult, dynamic and full of contrasts, beats furiously against this light, luminous, delicate structure, which emerges coldly from the chaos. Do not touch it, it is an accomplished fact. It had to be, it is there to stay. (1945)
  • Abstract Painting, Michel Seuphor, Dell Publishing Co., 1964, p. 33

• It’s not a country – it’s a world. It’s impossible to see the limits.. It’s only in Russia that I had a similar impression, but it wasn’t the same thing. In America you are confronted with a power in movement with force in reserve without end. An unbelievable vitality - a perpetual movement.
  • Letter from France, vol. 84, No 4, April 1946, pp. 46-62

• At the same time we would most like to run the film back and see how the sanctuaries close again and the lights go out and the great powers of nature are once again met with deserved reverence. One can fell an oak in twenty seconds; but in order to become what it now is, it grew for a century.. ..Progress is but a word without sense, and the cow, which keeps the world alive, will not move faster than three kilometres per hour in the future, either. (on the Circus, 1950)
  • Fernand Léger - The Later Years -, catalogue edited by Nicolas Serota, published by the Trustees of the Whitechapel Art gallery, London, Prestel Verlag, 1988, p. 15

• Isn’t it human to go beyond the limits, to grow beyond oneself, to strive toward freedom! The round is free. (on the Circus, 1950)
  • Fernand Léger - The Later Years -, catalogue edited by Nicolas Serota, published by the Trustees of the Whitechapel Art gallery, London, Prestel Verlag, 1988, p. 17

• The earth is round, so why to play it square? Beneath the sun and beneath the moon, in the clouds that sail gently by, everything is going round. Children dance in a ring; there is the Tour de France, and the bikes, and the eyes that look at them and frame them on the road.. ..You leave your rectangles, your geometrical windows, and you go to the land of circles in action.. ..It’s human nature to break through boundaries, to grow, to push towards freedom. Roundness is free; it has no beginning and no end. (on the Circus, 1950)
  • Fernand Léger - The Later Years -, catalogue edited by Nicolas Serota, published by the Trustees of the Whitechapel Art gallery, London, Prestel Verlag, 1988, p. 41

• They are not like the – patron’s hands or the – blessing hands of the curate – They resemble their tools, mountains, tree trunks.. ..The time is approaching when machines will – work FOR them – Then he will have hands like his boss – WHY NOT? – He’s on the way – HIS LIFE begins TODAY (text in his painting ‘Les mains’ –hommage a Maiakovski, 1951)
  • Fernand Léger - The Later Years -, catalogue edited by Nicolas Serota, published by the Trustees of the Whitechapel Art gallery, London, Prestel Verlag, 1988, p. 68

• One day I had painted a bunch of keys on a canvas, my bunch of keys. I didn’t know what to put next to them. I needed something that would be the absolute opposite of a bunch of keys. So when I finished work I went out. I had only walked a few yard when what should I see in a shop windows? A postcard of the Mona Lisa! At once I knew that was what I needed; what could have made a greater contrast to the keys?. ..Then I also added a can of sardines. It was such a strong contrast. (on his painting ‘La Joconde aux Clés’)
  • La vie fait de l’Oeuvre de Fernand Léger, Dora Vallier, Cahiers d’Art, 2, 1954, p. 153

• There was no telling who this head, or this leg, or that arm, belonged to.. ..So I scattered the limbs in my painting and realized that in this way I was getting much closer tot the truth than Michelangelo did when he concentrated on every separate muscle.
  • as quoted from the exhibition catalogue Fernand Legér, Paris, 1956

• I venture out to the great ‘sujet’; but, I repeat, my painting always remains object painting; it starts around 1936 with Adam et Eve. My figures humanise themselves further, but I always stick to the pictorial circumstance – no eloquence, no romanticism -
  • Bekentnisse und Gespräche, Fernand Léger, André Verdet, Zürich 1957 pp. 32-33

• The time of the often criticized art without real subject (l’art pour l’art) and the art without object (abstract art) seems to be over. We are experiencing a new return to the meaningful subject, which the common people can understand
  • Fernand Léger - The Later Years -, catalogue edited by Nicolas Serota, published by the Trustees of the Whitechapel Art gallery, London, Prestel Verlag, 1988, p. 12

• I was attracted to Romanesque sculptures, to the complete re-invented figures and the freedom with which the Romanesque artist constructed them. He does not copy, he creates in a totally anti-Renaissance fashion can say that in Romanesque sculpture I have found a starting point for distortion.
  • Kunst und Zeugnis, Dora Vallier, Zürich 1967, p. 67

• I wanted to proclaim a return to simplicity by ways of an immediate art without any subtlety, comprehensible to all. I love (Louis ) David, because he is so anti-impressionist.. ..I love the dryness in his work and also in that of Ingres. That was my way, and it touched me, instantly.
  • Kunst und Zeugnis, Dora Vallier, Zürich 1967, p. 62

• Let us take the time in this fast and ever-changing life which harasses us and tears us to pieces; to have the strength to remain slow and calm. To work outside the elements of disintegration that surrounds us. To comprehend life in it slow and calm sense. The work of art requires a temperate climate in order to develop fully. In this heightened tempo which is the law of life, to determine fixed points to hold onto them and to slowly work on the achievement of the future
  • Fernand Léger – Das Figürliche Werk, exhibition catalogue, Köln, 1978, p. 52

• In 1942 when I was in New York, I was struck by the neon advertisements flashing all over Broadway. You are there, you talk to someone, and all of a sudden he turns blue. Then the colour fades - another one comes and turns him red or yellow. The colour – the colour of neon advertising is free; it exists in space. I wanted to do the same in my canvases.
  • Legér and America, exhibition catalogue Fernand Léger, Buffalo 1982, p. 52

• I dispersed my objects in space and got them to hold together by making them radiate forwards, out of the picture. It’s all an easy interplay of chords and rhythms made up of foreground and background colours, of conducting lines, of distances and of contrasts.
  • exhibition catalogue Fernand Léger, Paris 1972, p. 91

• The mural artist is concerned with bringing to life dead surfaces by the application of colour. (on making murals, 1937)
  • Revival of Mural Art, The Listener, August 25, 1937 Vol. XVIII. No. 450, pp. 408-409

• It is from.. .. Renaissance that individualism in painting dates; and I do not believe there is any use in looking in this direction if we desire to bring into being a fresh mural art, one that shall be at once popular, collective and contemporary. on making murals, fh)
  • The New Realism goes on, F. Léger, Art Front, February 1937 pp. 7-8

• It is an outrage towards the masses.. ..It’s wanting to treat them as though they’re incapable of raising themselves up to this new realism (promoted by Léger and Le Corbusier, fh) which is that of their area, which they’ve made with their hands.. ..To want to say to these men ‘the modern is not for you it’s an art for the rich bourgeoisie.. (attack on the notion of a social realist art, around 1949)
  • Fernand Léger - The Later Years -, catalogue edited by Nicolas Serota, published by the Trustees of the Whitechapel Art gallery, London, Prestel Verlag, 1988, p. 58

• This is the visual world, using the most advanced advertising techniques that are familiar to the crowds in their daily life.. ..What kind of representational art do you want to inflict on these men then, when they’re solicited everyday by the cinema, radio, huge photomontages and advertising hoardings? How can you compete with these enormous modern mechanisms, which give you art to the 1000th degree? (around 1950, on the modern world of billboards and neon light)
  • Fernand Léger - The Later Years -, catalogue edited by Nicolas Serota, published by the Trustees of the Whitechapel Art gallery, London, Prestel Verlag, 1988, p. 58

• ..a yellow square, a red and blue avenue, an Eiffel tower with a camouflaged silhouette.. ..that would all be lit up at night, instead of fireworks.. (a proposal to Trotsky of a 'polychrome Moscow' for the 1937 exhibition)
  • Fernand Léger - The Later Years -, catalogue edited by Nicolas Serota, published by the Trustees of the Whitechapel Art gallery, London, Prestel Verlag, 1988, p. 60

• ..between ourselves, do you think a worker wants to hang a picture in his home where he sees himself sweating in a factory? He would prefer a bouquet of flowers or a pretty landscape. (critic on Aragon’s social realism, around 1950)
  • Fernand Léger - The Later Years -, catalogue edited by Nicolas Serota, published by the Trustees of the Whitechapel Art gallery, London, Prestel Verlag, 1988, p. 67

Unsourced

• A work of art must be significant in its own time like any other intellectual manifestation.. ..because it's visual.. ..it is a reflection of external conditions not pyschological ones. Every painting must allow for this momentary and eternal value which will make it last beyond the period of its creation.

About Fernand Léger

• It is curious to note that the most intellectual kind of painting, the one that tries to reduce reality to its essential elements, is ultimately but a visual delight. All it has kept of the world is its color. (This is apparent particularly in Léger.)
  • Albert Camus, 1942, The Myth of Sisyphus, "Absurd Creation".
    (The Myth of Sisyphus, and Other Essays, trans. Justin O'Brien, Knopf, 1955, ISBN 0679733736)

External links

Wikipedia has an article about:

Fernand Léger