Fernand Léger
gigatos | April 6, 2022
Summary
Fernand Léger (born, Jules Fernand Henri Léger) (b. 4 February 1881, Argentan, Normandy – d. 17 August 1955, Gif-sur-Yvette) was a French painter, graphic artist and decorative artist. He was among the first French painters to exhibit publicly works of Cubist and Constructivist orientation, although he himself is not considered to belong to those movements.
His first works – with obvious impressionist inspiration, in the manner of Paul Cézanne – date from 1903, to develop over time his own style, dynamic and full of optimism. Fascinated by industrial civilisation as well as social issues, Leger demonstrates his time in an innovative, expressive style. He likes large formats and creates large paintings and murals. He consistently aspires to integrate the fine arts into everyday life, on the street, in the city, in the church. He was not a typical studio painter, what attracted him was the artistic adventure, to eventually achieve absolute and mutual independence between forms, colours and space.
Fernand Léger was born on 4 February 1881 in the small town of Argentan in Normandy, the only son of Marie-Adèle Daunou and Henri-Armand Léger, a cattle breeder. At the age of three he was orphaned. He completed his studies at the parish school in Tinchbray and, from the age of 16, worked as a draughtsman in architectural workshops in Caen (1897-1899) and Paris (1900-1902). In 1902 he enrolled at the School of Decorative Arts (he also attended Léon Gérôme and Gabriel Ferrier”s courses at the École des Beaux-Arts, as well as those at the Académie Julian in Montparnasse and the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. From 1903 he works in a studio, which he shares with André Mare. He practises drawing in particular, but destroys all the works he produces during this time. Few works remain from this period, such as Jardin de ma mère (1905) or Gamins au soleil (1907), with obvious sentimental features, described by Apollinaire as “post-impressionist evening baths”. 1907 was marked by the retrospective exhibition devoted to Cézanne, which made a strong impression on Léger. In the same year he discovers the cubism of Picasso and Braque.
However, Léger proposes a personal style, even if he is still inspired by Cézanne”s art and Picasso”s paintings.
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“The Hive”
In 1908, Léger moved into “La Ruche” (“The Hive”), a bizarre eight-cornered building constructed from materials left over from the 1900 World”s Fair. The name was given to it because inside – around the central staircase, like a honeycomb – were 140 workshops. It was here that the Parisian bohemian art scene was concentrated. Léger met the painter Marc Chagall, the Russian sculptor Alexander Archipenko and the painter Robert Delaunay, with whom he formed a lasting friendship. He soon became neighbours with the writers Blaise Cendras, Guillaume Apollinaire and Max Jacob. Léger was still under the strong influence of Cézanne, the Fauvists and the Post-Impressionists, but he soon developed his own style, characterised by a monochromatic, muted colour palette and large format. At the Salon des Artistes Independents in 1910 he exhibited three paintings and two drawings. But the canvas Nus dans la forêt (”Nudes in the Forest”), exhibited at the 1911 Salon in Room 41, known as the ”Mecca of Cubism”, was a real sensation and surprised his colleagues. The sobriety of the colours, the cylindrical geometry of the images and the frenetic activity of the figures create a symbolic atmosphere of a dehumanised world that anticipates Italian Futurism. Léger”s Cubism is more visual than the initially intellectual Cubism of Picasso and Braque. Geometric volumes are no longer static and indistinguishable, they have an autonomous character, creating a dynamic antagonism between them.
Two years later, Léger rented a studio at 86 rue Notre-Dame-des Champs, where he would work for the rest of his life. His work is developing rapidly. He took part in the formation of the “Section d”Or” group, alongside Jacques Villon, Frantisek Kupka and Francis Picabia, began to tackle topical themes (Le Passage à niveau, 1912) and initiated the abstract cycle “Contrasts of Forms”, in which he reintroduced polychromaticism (La femme en bleu, 1912) and created an atmosphere of enchantment like Delaunay”s paintings, which led Apollinaire to describe this style as Orphism. However, whereas Delaunay”s colour predominates, Léger strives for “a balance between lines, shapes and colour” (Léger). The artist begins to show his independence from all currents. He continues to draw inspiration from Cubism in terms of overlapping geometric surfaces, angular faces and black outlines, but introduces his own plastic elements into the composition. Contrasts between light and dark colours, straight and curved lines, round and rectangular shapes suggest speed and give the illusion of movement.
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Years 1914 – 1930
Immediately after the outbreak of the First World War, Fernand Léger was mobilised and assigned as an engineer to the technical troop detachment. Gassed with hyperite, he was declared unfit for further military service at the end of 1917. On his return to Paris, the artist completely changed his style, a decision he explains as follows: “The war was a sublime event for me. I left the Paris of the era of deliberate painting in which abstract art reigned, to suddenly find myself in the midst of the geniuses, craftsmen who worked in wood and metal. It would have taken even less than that for me to forget the abstract forms of 1912-1913.” From 1918 Léger was taken over by the gallery owner Léonce Rosenberg, who regularly exhibited his work at the Galerie de l”Effort Moderne in Paris.
Attracted early on by the life of forms, by the physical prestige of objects in a world increasingly marked by modern technological accumulations, he goes through a so-called “mechanical age”. His constructive vocation is now crystallising, bringing into the picture the tubular network of technical machinery, which soon lends something of its simple and pregnant geometry to human figures. In his composition Les disques (“Discs”, 1918), Léger still retains the abstract theme. His aesthetic experiments continue to revolve around contrasts between flat shapes and chromatic surfaces. His work is rich, expressive, abundant in bright colours, a synthesis of a lyrical vision of a world dominated by machines. Gradually, human figures become more and more present and more clear in his paintings (“People in the City”, 1918). In the composition Trois femmes (“Three Women”, 1921), also known as Le grand petit-déjeuner, the human figure takes pride of place. Contrast – the mainstay of his aesthetic – is expressed in a wide variety of oppositions. The undulating shapes of the female silhouettes contrast with the geometric architecture of the background, and the horizontal and vertical lines are repeated in the positions of the characters.
On 2 December 1919, Fernand Léger married Jeanne Lohy, a young woman he had been with before the outbreak of war. They live in Fontenay-aux-Roses near Paris, but the artist continues to paint in his studio in Montparnasse. Léger is a versatile creator, illustrating books by Blaise Cendras and André Malraux, working on Abel Gance”s film La Roue, and designing the poster, sets, costumes and curtain for Ralf de Maré and his Ballets suédois troupe for the ballet Skating Rink to music by Darius Milhaud. Fascinated by the world of film, he collaborates on the set design for Marcel L”Herbier”s production of L”Inhumaine and makes his own short film Ballet mécanique, with photography by Dudley Murphy and Man Ray. Important for his development are his meetings with the architect Le Corbusier (1920) and the Dutch painter Theo van Doesburg, founder of the magazine “De Stijl”. Keen to promote a new art, he founded the Academy of Modern Painting (Académie Moderne) in 1924, where he was a long-time teacher. In 1925 he produced his first monumental murals. Together with Robert Delaunay, he designs the decoration of the French pavilion at the International Exhibition of Decorative and Industrial Art in Paris. At the same exhibition, in the “L”Esprit Nouveau” pavilion designed by Le Corbusier, Léger presents a panel with an abstract composition.
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“Direct art, understood by all” (Léger)
In making his first paintings for wall decoration, Fernand Léger discovered the possibilities hidden in decorative art, the colours and space used in the compositions being combined with architecture. In September 1931, Léger travels to the United States for the first time, visiting New York and Chicago. During his second trip to America, in October 1935, he discovers “the beauty of New York evenings generated by the countless lights and the relentless play of advertisements”. He would spend several more months in the United States in 1938, when he decorated the house of “Nelson Rockefeller Jr.” in New York, and then, from 1940 onwards, he stayed there for the duration of the war. Here he lectures at Yale University and at a college in California. Back in France (1944), he participates in the making of Hans Richter”s film Dreams that money can buy (1947).
His stay in America marks an important stage in Léger”s creation. On the one hand, we can see his even greater independence of form and colour, and on the other, the creation of large-scale paintings devoted to social issues and some of his favourite themes: everyday life and the world of the circus. In the painting Les Loisirs (”Leisure Time Party”, 1948
At the end of 1946, he executed mosaics for the façade of the church in Assy (Haute-Savoie), four years later he worked on the stained glass windows of the new church in Audincourt, built – like the one in Assy – by the architect Maurice Novarina.
At almost 70, the artist discovers the third dimension and opens a ceramics studio in Biot, a small town on the Côte d”Azur.
On 21 February 1952 he married Nadia Chodasiewicz, who had been assisting him for several years in the production of some of his compositions. After their marriage they moved to Gif-sur-Yvette near Paris. On 17 August 1955, Fernand Léger dies of a heart attack at the age of 74. On Nadia”s initiative, a state museum of Fernand Léger”s works is built on their property in Biot and inaugurated on 13 May 1960.
Bringing into the picture the realities of the time in which he lived, full of the achievements of modern technology, Léger took particular interest in the human figure in an environment artificialised by the presence of mechanical elements. Floral and zoomorphic motifs also restore the intimacy of human existence in a nature impregnated with artefacts. The vivid, sharp colours, like bright advertisements, evoking the atmosphere of big cities, an atmosphere that denies any idyllic, urban paradise, and the clear construction of forms, in which severe geometry sometimes meets the freshness of a naive drawing, seem to have led the American art critic Marvin Sweeney to speak of Léger as a “primitive of the modern age”.
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