ART 18|21

Fernand Leger (1881-1955)

Léger became a student at the École des Arts Décortifs, Paris in 1903. His early work was influenced by Impressionism but 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. In 1909 he moved to Montparnasse and met members of the avant-garde; Archipenko, Lipchitz, Chagall, and Robert Delaunay. In his major painting of this period Nudes in the Forest (1909-10), Léger displayed a personal form of Cubism which his critics called "Tubism" for its emphasis on cylindrical forms unlike the collage technique pioneered by Braque and Picasso.
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 known as Section d'Or (The Golden Section). Léger was influenced during this time by Italian Futurism, and until 1914 his paintings became increasingly abstract. The vocabulary of tubular, conical, and cubed forms are laconically rendered in rough patches of primary colours plus green, black and white.
During the Second World War, Leger lived in the USA where he taught at Yale, returning to Paris in 1945, where he opened an academy. His large paintings celebrating the people (featuring acrobats, cyclists and builders) thickly contoured and painted in clear, flat colours, reflected his political interest in the working class, and his attempt to create accessible art. In 1950 he founded a ceramics studio at Biot, which, in 1957 became the Léger Museum. Léger was one of the giants of 20th c French painting, whose influence has been almost as great as his reputation.