Fernand Léger

French painter

• Born: February 4, 1881
• Birthplace: Argentan, France
• Died: August 17, 1955
• Place of death: Gif-sur-Yvette, France

Léger was known primarily for depicting people as machinelike creatures in his paintings. He was an avid admirer of things modern and strove to reconcile the significance of modern art with an image of the industrial machine society.

Early Life

Fernand Léger (fer-nahn lay-zhah), son of a cattle breeder, was born in Argentan, Normandy, where he spent his earliest years. His father was an imposing figure, athletically built and resolute in his conviction that Fernand was to become an architect. Had it not been for his father’s untimely death, Léger’s life might have taken a different path. Fernand was sent to Caen at the age of sixteen to serve as an apprentice in an architect’s office, where he learned to draw plans and blueprints. It was during these two years at Caen that Léger, somewhat impulsively, decided to become a painter. This decision was less than wholeheartedly supported by his mother and uncle, who believed that the profession lacked respectability.

When he arrived in Paris in 1900, Léger applied for admittance to the École des Beaux-Arts. Failing to pass the rigorous entrance examination, he was admitted instead to the École des Beaux-Arts Décoratifs and the Académie Julian, but he chose to attend classes as an unenrolled student in the Beaux-Arts studios of Leon Gérôme and Gabriel Ferrier. Because of his miserable living conditions, Léger fell ill in 1905 the same year that the Fauves were creating a stir with their use of strong pure color and spent the winter recuperating in Corsica. His Corsican paintings were derivative of Impressionism, which by this time had ceased to be a progressive style.

It was with some difficulty that Léger freed himself from the pull of Impressionism, but he realized that the harmonious style of the Impressionists was at odds with the realities of his own time. Léger was influenced most by Paul Cézanne’s style during his early years, and the great Cézanne retrospective of 1907 at the Salon d’Automne was a revelation for him. He credited Cézanne with understanding what had remained unresolved in the painting of the past. He saw Cézanne’s art as providing a foundation for the adoption of a revolutionary new painting vocabulary, one that emphasized form and color.

Life’s Work

After securing a studio in the Montparnasse district of Paris in 1908, Léger came into contact with the flourishing circle of avant-garde writers and artists who inhabited the cafés of prewar Paris. He developed a lifelong friendship with the poet Blaise Cendrars, with whom he was to collaborate on several projects throughout his career. He also met Henri Rousseau, whose paintings exhibited a hardness of form and simplicity of conception that he greatly admired.

Through his association with Robert Delaunay and the writers Guillaume Apollinaire and Max Jacob, Léger was introduced to the work of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, whose cubist experiments boldly rejected traditional perspective and the single viewpoint of the Renaissance. Influenced by Cézanne’s new method of depicting volume and space by exploiting planes of color, rather than line or shade, their work was characterized by a dense clustering of spatial planes.

Léger’s Les Nus dans la forět (nudes in the forest) of 1909-1910 was the artist’s first contribution to the development of modern art and assured for him a place in the Parisian avant-garde. This painting created a sensation when it was exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants in 1911 alongside works by Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger, Marie Laurencin, and Delaunay. It was because of this exhibit that the term “cubism” found its way into the popular media. The sheer force with which Léger’s forms confront each other creates a clashing quality that sets it apart from cubism and Cézanne’s late work and testifies to the individuality of his adaptation of cubist ideas.

In the 1913 essay “The Origins of Painting,” Léger asserted that the most powerful tool available to painting was that of contrast. The inherent conflict between flatness and volume, curved and straight lines, realism and abstraction, and the contrast of color formed the basis of his formal experiments for the remainder of his life. The development of this idea can be seen as early as 1913 in his series of paintings entitled Contrasts of Forms . This series produced some of the first totally abstract paintings ever painted. The machinelike forms are depicted in a thoroughly modern context. Like the Italian Futurists and many other artists and writers who began their careers just before the outbreak of World War I, Léger idolized all things modern and believed in the possibility of a glorious new world based on the power of the machine.

Serving as a stretcher bearer, Léger experienced the horrors of World War I at first hand; he was gassed at Verdun and cashiered from the army as an invalid. His years spent working alongside ordinary working-class men had a profound effect on both the direction of his art and his perception of his role as an artist in society: A sense of social responsibility and a desire to reach out to the ordinary citizen began to take an important place in Léger’s work.

Another effect of the war on Léger was the almost revelatory experience of the inherent beauty in the forms of war machinery. He began to depict flat, rather than volumetric, shapes, and his color became simpler, pure, and bold. Les Disques (the disks) of 1918 and Éléments mécaniques (mechanical elements) of 1918-1923 demonstrate Léger’s infatuation with the workings of machines, whose forms he borrowed and recombined to create dynamic images of the modern world.

The 1920’s were a decade of intense and diverse artistic activity for Léger. Besides producing paintings and drawings, he designed sets and costumes for ballet and theater productions, became involved in experimental cinema, collaborated with architects, and taught painting at the Académie Moderne. Le Grand Déjeuner of 1921 is one of his major works from this period. It is one of many monumental compositions in which solemn, ponderous figures are the predominant image. The great figure compositions of this time derive from his admiration of the classic French tradition of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Nicolas Poussin, and Jacques-Louis David, whose restraint and serenity are combined with a completely modern treatment of the grand figure style. Léger’s work came closest to abstraction when designed for an architectural context. He believed that those paintings that were designed to function as part of an architectural unit had specific objectives and problems apart from those of easel paintings.

In 1924, Léger directed an experimental film entitled Le Ballet mécanique, in which close-ups of isolated objects celebrate the aesthetic beauty of ordinary things. Soon after directing this film, he produced a series of paintings that he called his “objects in space.” Images of everyday manufactured objects such as pipes, lamps, or keys were isolated and suspended in space. Unlike the Surrealists, who used quotidian objects in strange juxtapositions for symbolic purposes, Léger created objects that were themselves the subjects of his paintings.

During the 1930’s, Léger made three trips to the United States, where he exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago and at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where he also decorated an apartment for Nelson Rockefeller. He was impressed with the vivacity of American cities and called New York “the greatest spectacle on earth.” A vocal antifascist, Léger fled Nazi-occupied Europe in 1940 and spent the next five years living and working in the United States. Several of his last great series of paintings were executed during this period of the 1940’s, including Les Plongeurs (the divers), Les Trois Musiciens (the three musicians), and several paintings of bicycle and circus subjects themes that interested him for the remainder of his career.

On his return to France after the war, Léger completed a series of paintings called Les Constructeurs (the builders), based on his impressions of the rebuilding of war-ravaged Europe. It is noteworthy that Léger concentrated on this optimistic theme in the face of the devastation of war.

At the age of seventy-three, Léger painted the final version of the monumental, nine-by-thirteen-foot La Grande Parade (the great parade). This painting was the climax of ideas that had occupied the artist for the past fifteen years. His art was intended for a mass audience rather than for the artistic intelligentsia. Fernand Léger won the Grand Prize at the Third São Paulo Biennale in 1955, just before he died on August 17 of that year at Gif-sur-Yvette.

Significance

In an age when it was fashionable for artists to respond to their world with either nihilism or narcissism, Fernand Léger did neither. He eschewed both sentimentality and “good taste” in art: He preferred bold, forthright statements. His color and form create their own reality by asserting a physical presence through his forceful manipulation of pictorial elements.

Léger’s open-minded attitude and diverse intellectual curiosity allowed him to be affected by most of the major art movements of his day without ever losing hold of his personal vision. With his sense of visual and intellectual freedom, Léger expanded much of the theoretical doctrine of twentieth century art and provided a link between the early pioneers of modern art and those of later generations.

Léger embraced the industrial components of twentieth century life with an unswerving faith that the machine would create a better world for humankind. His conception of art was a moral one, and he felt that collective society could derive a positive benefit from contact with the power of painted images. When, in his most mechanical phase, his painted figures take on the appearance of machines, it is his supreme compliment; this signifies that humans are perfectly tuned and ordered beings, in complete harmony with their environment. When, in his late works, figures are depicted as robust peasant types, they signify his vision of the common person as modern hero full of the vigor of life and in full control of his or her destiny.

Bibliography

Brunhammer, Yvonne. Léger: Monumental Oeuvre. Milan, Italy: Five Continents Editions, 2007. Analyzes Léger’s murals, including his commissions for the 1925 and 1937 World Fairs in Paris and his subsequent murals painted in France and the United States.

De Francia, Peter. Fernand Léger. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1983. De Francia’s 275-page book explores the entire scope of Léger’s artistic production, providing an in-depth look at the artist’s involvement with film and theater as well as painting. The importance of social and political factors to Léger’s creative contributions is emphasized. The book features 162 illustrations, 63 in color.

Green, Christopher. Léger and the Avant-garde. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1976. A 350-page exploration of Léger’s work in the context of his relationship with the leading poets, thinkers, architects, musicians, and artists of his day. This book discusses the specific influences of the ideas of such important members of the avant-garde as Le Corbusier, Gino Severini, and Cendrars on Léger’s development. The book features 2,013 illustrations, 8 of them in color.

Léger, Fernand. Fernand Léger. New York: Abbeville Press, 1982. Published as the exhibition catalog of the exhibit of Léger’s work held at the Albright-Knox Gallery in 1982, this 160-page book contains three essays on specific aspects of Léger’s career. A chronology of Léger’s life with 120 illustrations (76 in color) of the exhibited works is also included.

Schmalenbach, Werner. Fernand Léger. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1976. This 173-page monograph contains seventy-seven black-and-white illustrations; forty-eight color plates of Léger’s most important paintings with a critical discussion of each work and its relationship to his artistic development; and a biographical outline. A large number of Léger’s drawings also illustrate the text, which is clearly and concisely written.

Verdet, André. Léger. New York: Hamlyn, 1970. This is the most personal summary of Léger’s life and achievements, written by an obvious champion of the man himself. This ninety-six-page book contains a biographical outline, sixty-six illustrations, forty-three in full color, a list of exhibitions and catalogs, and an extensive bibliography.