Fernand Leger

Fernand Léger (February 4, 1881 - August 17, 1955) was a leading French Cubist painter of the first half of the century XX. The main collection of his works can be seen in the Musée national Fernand-Léger, located in Biot, in the Alpes-Maritimes, a French State museum inaugurated in 1960. Fernand Léger's painting was characterized by its confluence with architectural aspects, paying special attention to importance to the relationships between shapes, lines and colors. In addition, his preference for mural painting allowed him to introduce other factors into his works.

Life and work

Born in Argentan, Normandy, into a peasant family, his father was orphaned before he was two years old. He received instruction first at the school in his native town and later at a religious institute in Tinchebray.

Between 1897 and 1899 he was a student of an architect in Caen; in 1900 he moved to Paris, where he worked as an architectural draftsman, while studying at the Académie Julian. After completing his military service (1902-1903), he entered the National Superior School of Decorative Arts, failing to get a place at the Fine Arts School, where, as a free student, he received lessons from Jean-Léon Gérôme and Gabriel Ferrier.. He regularly visited the Louvre Museum and, like other painters of his generation, owed to impressionism, initiated in the galleries of Rue de Laffitte, the essence of his artistic training.

His first works date from 1905 and are clearly influenced by Impressionism.

In 1907, like other Parisian painters, he was deeply impressed by the Cézanne retrospective. In this same year he came into contact with the first cubism of Picasso and Braque.

From the first moments, Léger's cubism was oriented towards the development of the iconography of the machine.

Nudes in the Woods (1909-1910), possibly inspired by Picasso's 1908 painting of the same title, turns the subject into a room filled with artifacts and robots, where he seems to stand apart from the Cézanne's iron doctrine of painting from the cylinder and the cone; the sobriety of the colors, together with the frenetic activity of the robots, creates a symbolic atmosphere of a new and dehumanized world. In some respects it is an anticipation of Italian Futurism.

In 1910 he exhibited with Braque and Picasso at the Kahnweiler gallery where, in 1912, he also did his first solo show. The following year he began to investigate forms of machines represented with primary colors, sometimes reaching an abstract structure that became more explicit with the titles, such as Form Contrast, from 1913, where it approaches Delaunay's ideas on color contrasts, while maintaining the marked three-dimensionality of his early works. His fascination with geometric shapes and bright colors often leads him to the brink of abstract art, which he always ends up rejecting.

In Staircase, from 1914, he repainted the figure and its surroundings, but building it using the abstract forms used previously.

Between 1914 and 1917 he completed his military service. The experience of war reveals to him the visual possibilities of machines as icons of modernity; Although his style was already predisposed in this direction, from then on he used cylindrical and geometric forms to devise a mechanized world, although, unlike the Futurists, he did not worship the machine, but wanted to reconcile its metallic and regular forms with organic forms, to build a humanist vision.

The City, from 1919, is a key work in Léger's investigations into the relationship between reality and the painted surface. In this painting controls the usual sculptural aspect of his painting through architectural rigidity, establishing the primacy of the two-dimensionality of the pictorial plane; he uses various advanced methods of synthetic cubism to achieve all kinds of illusionistic variations. In the works of this period that have the city as their theme, the human figure appears depersonalized and mechanized, adapted to the environment that surrounds it. The artist translates the energy of contemporary life into pictorial equivalents; mass, color and shape are confronted in a multiplicity of relationships, creating independent images that produce simultaneous sensations; the planes are arranged in a balanced way and the compositions are organized by well-defined areas of pure, uniform and clearly delimited colour. "Léger's pictorial elements, clear, simple, varied, produce, like ideal machines, effects of extraordinary power" (Flint).

In the early twenties he collaborated with the writer Blaise Cendrars on some films, and designed sets and costumes for Rolf de Maré's Ballets suédois.

In 1923-1924 he worked on his first film without a plot, Ballet mécanique, in which Man Ray also took part. In 1924 he opens a workshop with Ozenfant, and in 1925 he made the first murals of him in the Pavilion of the L & # 39; Esprit Nouveau by Le Corbusier, for the Exhibition International of Decorative Arts.

During the twenties and thirties, Léger was open to the styles that developed. Some of his paintings from these years show certain influences from Kandinsky, De Stijl and Surrealism.

The theme that he develops the most at this time is the figure, in compositions such as Three Women (1921), where the figures are shown depersonalized, like mechanical volumes modeled from the geometric background, giving a further step towards abstraction, while at the same time evoking an art deco atmosphere. In paintings like this he clearly approaches the purism of Ozenfant and Le Corbusier.

In 1931 he visited the United States for the first time and, in 1935, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Art Institute of Chicago exhibited his work. Between 1940 and 1945 he lived in the United States as a result of the Nazi occupation of the country, and returned to France at the end of the war. During his stay in the United States he is a professor at Yale University.

In the last ten years of his life he made book illustrations, paintings of monumental figures, mural paintings, stained glass windows, mosaics, polychrome ceramic sculptures and theater sets. In 1955 he won the grand prize at the São Paulo Biennial.

He died on August 17 of that same year in Gif-sur-Yvette, France.

Gallery

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  Bimural by Fernand Léger (1954), by Fernand Léger, currently in the University City of Caracas (Caracas, Venezuela).

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  Bimural by Fernand Léger (1954), by Fernand Léger, currently in the University City of Caracas (Caracas, Venezuela).

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  Vitral de Fernand Léger (1954), by Fernand Léger, currently in the University City of Caracas (Caracas, Venezuela).

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  Graffiti, Museo-monumento al deportato politico e razziale, Carpi, Italy. Photo by Paolo Monti, 1973.