Léger, Fernand

Léger, Fernand (1881–1955). French painter and designer, born at Argentan in Normandy of peasant farming stock. In 1897–9 he was apprenticed to an architect in Caen, then in 1900 settled in Paris, where he supported himself as an architectural draughtsman (and for a while as a photographic retoucher) whilst studying art at the Académie Julian and elsewhere. His early paintings were Impressionist in style, but in 1907 he was overwhelmed by the exhibition of Cézanne's work at the Salon d'Automne, and in the following year he came into contact with several leading avant-garde artists when he rented a studio in La Ruche. Robert Delaunay was among his friends and he met and admired Henri Rousseau. He was briefly influenced by Fauvism, but in 1909 he turned to Cubism. Although he is regarded as one of the major figures of the movement, he always stood somewhat apart from its central course; he disjointed forms but did not fragment them in the manner of Braque and Picasso, preferring bold tubular shapes (he was for a time known as a ‘tubist'), as in his first major work, Nudes in a Forest (Rijksmuseum KröllerMüller, Otterlo, 1909–10). He also used much brighter colour than Braque and Picasso. In 1912 he had his first one-man exhibition, at Kahnweiler's gallery, and he was beginning to prosper when the First World War interrupted his career. By this time his work had come close to complete abstraction.

Léger enlisted in the army and served as a sapper in the front line, then as a stretcher-bearer. The war was ‘a complete revelation to me as a man and a painter'. It enlarged his outlook by bringing him into contact with people from different social classes and walks of life and also by underlining his feeling for the beauty of machinery: ‘During those four war years I was abruptly thrust into a reality which was both blinding and new. When I left Paris my style was thoroughly abstract … Suddenly, and without any break, I found myself on a level with the whole of the French people; my new companions in the Engineer Corps were miners, navvies, workers in wood. Among them I discovered the French people. At the same time I was dazzled by the breech of a 74–millimetre gun which was standing uncovered in the sunshine: the magic of light on white metal. This was enough to make me forget the abstract art of 1912–13 … Once I had got my teeth into that sort of reality I never let go of objects again.’ After being gassed, he spent more than a year in hospital and was discharged in 1917. In that year he painted Soldiers Playing at Cards (Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller), which he regarded as ‘the first picture in which I deliberately took my subject from our own epoch'.

During the next few years, Léger's work showed a fascination with machine-like forms, and even his human figures were depicted as almost robot-like beings (The City, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1919). In 1920 he met Le Corbusier and Ozenfant, who shared his interest in a machine aesthetic, and in the mid-1920s his work became flatter and more stylized, in line with their Purist style. He used bold, poster-like contrasts of form and colour, with strong black outlines and extensive areas of flat, uniform colour. In the interwar years he expanded his range beyond easel painting with murals (sometimes completely abstract) and designs for the theatre and cinema (in 1923–4 he conceived, produced, and directed the film Le Ballet mécanique, with photography by Man Ray; it has no plot and shows everyday objects in rhythmic motion). He was also busy teaching at his own school founded with Ozenfant in 1924 as the Académie de l'Art Moderne (Ozenfant left in 1929 but it continued as the Académie de l'Art Contemporain until 1939). He also travelled extensively, making three visits to the USA in the 1930s. The contacts that he made during these visits stood him in good stead when he lived in America during the Second World War, teaching at Yale University and at Mills College, California.

Léger's work of the war years included pictures of acrobats, cyclists, and musicians, and after his return to France in 1945 he concentrated on the human figure rather than the machine. He joined the French Communist Party soon after his return (he had been sympathetic to it long before this) and favoured proletarian subjects that he hoped would be accessible to the working class. Some of these pictures were very big (notably The Great Parade, Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1954), and in his later career he also worked a good deal on large decorative commissions, notably stained-glass windows and tapestries for the church at Audincourt (1951) and a glass mosaic for the University of Caracas (1954). In 1949 he began making ceramic sculptures. Many honours came to him late in life, including the Grand Prix at the 1955 São Paulo Bienal. Shortly before his death he bought a large house at Biot, a village between Cannes and Nice, and his widow built a museum of his work here, opened in 1960.

In the catalogue of the exhibition ‘Léger and Purist Paris’ (Tate Gallery, London, 1970), John Golding wrote of Léger: ‘No other major twentieth-century artist was to react to, and to reflect, such a wide range of artistic currents and movements. Fauvism, Cubism, Futurism, Purism, Neo-Plasticism, Surrealism, Neo-Classicism, Social Realism, his art experienced them all. And yet he was to remain supremely independent as an artistic personality. Never at any time in his career could he be described as a follower; the very vigour and strength of his character would in themselves have rendered such a position inconceivable. But his originality lay basically in his ability to adapt the ideas and to a certain extent the visual discoveries of others to his own ends.’ However, despite Léger's centrality in modern art, Edward Lucie-Smith thinks that he ‘still ranks as an under-appreciated artist, one who is on the whole more respected than loved. His work has a deliberate harshness which repels many spectators’ (Lives of the Great Twentieth Century Artists, 1986). Certainly he never achieved the popularity with ordinary working-class people that he aimed for.