Fernand Leger French, 1881-1955

Fernand Léger (1881–1955) developed a distinctive modernist language from the visual and social realities of the machine age. Emerging from Cubism, he progressively replaced the fractured planes of analytical Cubism with simplified forms—tubes, cylinders, discs, and geometric volumes—set against areas of flat, primary color. His subjects were equally modern: the city, the worker, the bicycle, the crane, and the acrobat. Yet Léger’s interest in modernity was not simply formal. He believed that art should speak to ordinary people rather than remain the preserve of connoisseurs and sought to bring modern art into public and everyday life. He worked across painting, mural, mosaic, stained glass, ceramics, stage design, and film, and his influence extended well beyond painting into architecture, graphic design, and advertising.

Born in Argentan, Normandy, to a cattle breeder, Léger trained as an architectural draughtsman before moving to Paris in 1900. Refused admission to the École des Beaux-Arts, he studied at the Académie Julian and in the Louvre. The Cézanne retrospective of 1907 and a close friendship with Robert Delaunay set the direction of his work: his painting became increasingly abstract, while his palette narrowed to black, white, and the primary colors. His Cubism was always closer to the mechanical than to the analytic. In October 1913, while working on Contrastes de formes, he signed a three-year exclusive contract with Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, the dealer of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, who bought the paintings as they were completed and placed them in group exhibitions outside France, giving Léger financial security for the first time.

The First World War changed Léger permanently. Serving as a sapper at Verdun and later gassed at the front, he emerged from the war, in his own account, dazzled by the sight of the breech of a seventy-five-millimeter gun in sunlight. He transformed that experience of hard, mechanical order into works such as the Contrastes de formes series and The City of 1919. The camera began to alter his painting before he ever used one himself. Seeing Chaplin while on leave in 1916 was a revelation, and from 1919 his work increasingly absorbed the language of the cinematographic image. The books he made with Blaise Cendrars and Yvan Goll play with the close-up, typography, and the visual effects of movement.

In 1924, Léger made Ballet mécanique, his only film, conceived and written by him and co-directed with Dudley Murphy, with cinematography by Murphy and Man Ray, Kiki de Montparnasse before the camera, and a score by George Antheil. One of the founding works of avant-garde cinema, it is constructed from repetition, movement, and multiple imagery. Léger tested the rushes on local workers and, after deceiving an audience with an extreme close-up, concluded that the subject or object is nothing; it is the effect that counts.

The 1930s brought international recognition and an increasing engagement with public art. For the Exposition Internationale of 1937, the French state commissioned six oversized panels, of which Le Transport des forces survives. Declared a degenerate artist by the Nazis, Léger spent the war years in the United States, teaching at Yale and Mills College. He returned to France in 1945 and joined the Communist Party. Driven by his ideal of art for all, he undertook monumental commissions at Assy, Audincourt, Caracas, and the United Nations, while producing large, optimistic series devoted to leisure and labor, including La Grande Parade, La Partie de campagne, and Les Constructeurs.

From 1949, Léger worked at Biot with Roland Brice on polychrome ceramic sculpture, and in 1955 purchased land there. He died at Gif-sur-Yvette in August of that year. During his lifetime, he was awarded the Grand Prix at the São Paulo Biennale.