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.

Fernand Léger

The French painter Fernand Léger (1881-1955) was one of the original cubists. The imagery of his mature paintings is concerned with the human figure in urban and technological environments.

At the turn of the century Paris was the acknowledged center of the international art world, a locus of extraordinary intellectual and creative vitality. Numerous artistic styles reached fruition at this time, included Fauvism, postimpressionism, and Art Nouveau. Moreover, there were individual masters working in Paris during these years, most notably Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, who would affect the entire history of modern art. It was within this charged atmosphere that Fernand Léger began his career as a painter.

Léger was born in Argentan, Normandy, on Feb. 4, 1881. In 1900 he moved to Paris, where he worked as an architectural draftsman and studied briefly at the École des Beaux-Arts. During this period he came under the influence of Paul Cézanne and Matisse, and he became friends with the modern primitive Henri Rousseau. By 1906 Léger had decided to devote himself entirely to painting, and from then until 1910 he gradually adjusted his art to the radical and burgeoning style of cubism.

Early Style

Léger's work from the early 1910s reflects many of the basic tenets of cubism. Pictorial space becomes increasingly shallow, and forms from the visible world gradually lose their identity, giving way to abstract planes of somber color. A distinctive feature of these early paintings involves Léger's personal penchant for machinelike constructions: however nonobjective the pictures are, their imagery seems to consist of metallic sheets, cones, and cylinders. Occasionally, human figures or landscape forms are translated into this new vocabulary, but, just as frequently, the mechanical elements appear as abstract ends in themselves. This interest in machine technology persisted throughout Léger's entire career. Some of his best and most characteristic early works are Nudes in the Forest (1910), Woman in Blue (1912), and Contrasting Forms (1914).

Léger's career was interrupted by World War I. He was mobilized in 1914, and in 1917 he was gassed and hospitalized for several months.

Between the Wars

During the 1920s Léger was highly productive not only in painting but in related fields. He designed sets and costumes for the Swedish Ballet (1921-1922) and collaborated with Dudley Murphey on a film, Ballet méchanique (1923-1924). The film, which utilized Léger's mechanistic images extensively, was a seminal work in the history of experimental cinema. Both activities reveal a characteristic feature of 20th-century art in general: the modern artist's persistent desire to relate his work to other creative fields and to combine the esthetics of different media.

In 1925 Léger designed a series of murals for the Pavillon de l'Esprit Nouveau at the Exposition des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. His art was amply suited to such an enterprise, particularly in terms of its large scale and strong, projecting color. In addition, his concern with the human figure in its modern, technological environment made his art accessible in public and social terms. He continued to engage in public projects throughout his career, such as the mosaics for the facade of the Church of Notre-Dame at Assy (1949) and the murals for the United Nations General Assembly auditorium in New York City (1952).

During the 1920s, although Léger remained generally faithful to the cubist dicta of shallow space and planar construction, he began to broaden his forms, thereby achieving an increased sense of monumentality. The work from this period can be separated into two groups: figurative and nonfigurative.

The first group most successfully conveys Léger's machine-world philosophy. In The City (1919), for instance, forms of the urban environment are translated into large planar areas that suggest the enormous sweep of the city and its dwarfing of human inhabitants. But his vision of the modern world was never pessimistic. Paintings like Le Grand déjeuner (1921) and Woman with Flowers in Her Hand (1922) are populated by human figures who dominate their environments. With bodies constructed of brassy cones, spheres, and cylinders, and with black hair that resembles sheets of polished enamel, these figures are both as large and as powerful as the urban worlds they inhabit. In addition, Léger's color, which in the 1920s became more vibrant and aggressive, helped to corroborate his optimistic vision of the modern city.

Léger's nonfigurative paintings during this period are more intimate. Based on still-life motifs, they look like details or miniatures of the robust figurative panoramas. Nevertheless, they retain the artist's characteristic machine-world orientation. An excellent example of this style is Compass (1926).

Late Work

Between 1940 and 1946 Léger lived in the United States. He traveled extensively, responding enthusiastically to the American landscape, particularly to its vast urban complexes, and taught briefly.

Léger's style during these years, beginning actually in the late 1930s, shifted again. He continued to monumentalize his scale and to intensify his interest in the human figure. In many works, for instance, Romantic Landscape (1946) and Homage to David (1948-1949), he broke away from the shallow space of cubism, returning to a more classical figure and landscape imagery.

When Léger returned to France, he settled at Gif-sur-Yvette near Paris. There he continued to work on his painting and on public commissions until his death on Aug. 17, 1955.

Further Reading

Two excellent exhibition catalogs on Léger are Katharine Kuh, Léger (1953), and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Fernand Léger: Five Themes and Variations (1962). A comprehensive survey of cubism, including Léger's relation to the movement, is Robert Rosenblum, Cubism and Twentieth-century Art (1961; rev. ed. 1966).

Additional Sources

Diehl, Gaston, F. Léger, New York: Crown Publishers, 1985. □

Léger, Fernand (b Argentan, Normandy, 4 Feb. 1881; d Gif-sur-Yvette, Seine-et-Oise, 17 Aug. 1955). French painter and designer. After passing through various early influences he turned to Cubism in 1909. 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’). During the First World War he served as a sapper in the front line, then as a stretcher-bearer, and his experiences were ‘a complete revelation to me as a man and a painter’. They 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. Henceforward he made it his ambition to create an art that would be accessible to all ranks of modern society. After being gassed, he spent more than a year in hospital and was discharged in 1917. During the next few years, his work showed a fascination with machine-like forms, and even his human figures were depicted as almost robot-like beings (The City, 1919, Philadelphia Mus. of Art). 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 inter-war years he expanded his range beyond easel painting with murals (sometimes completely abstract) and designs for the theatre and cinema. He was also busy as a teacher and travelled widely, 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.

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 and favoured proletarian subjects. Some of his pictures in this vein were very big, especially The Great Parade (1954, Guggenheim Mus., New York), 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). Many honours came to him late in life, including the Grand Prix at the 1955 São Paulo Bienale. 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 there, opened in 1960.

In the catalogue of the exhibition ‘Léger and Purist Paris’ (1970, Tate, London), 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.’ 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.

Fernand Léger , 1881–1955, French painter. Léger first studied architecture, then he began to paint, studying briefly at the École des Beaux-Arts. He became known for his cubist paintings in 1910, and a modified cubism is apparent in much of his subsequent work. In works such as The City (1919; Phila. Mus. of Art), Léger celebrated the machine in a naive, energetic style characterized by flat tones of pure color, black, white, and gray. He taught painting in Paris and New York City. Two of his mural designs were executed by a pupil at the United Nations, New York. Several of his paintings are in the Museum of Modern Art, New York City.

Bibliography: See studies by K. Kuh (1953), R. L. Delevoy (tr. 1962), and J. Casson and J. Leymarie (1974).

Léger, Fernand (1881–1955) French painter. An influential member of the School of Paris, he evolved a form of cubism jokingly called ‘tubism’ because of its emphasis on cylindrical, mechanical forms. Examples include the series Contrast of Forms (1913). Léger directed the first non-narrative film Ballet méchanique (1924).

http://www.tate.org.uk; http://www.guggenheimcollection.org; http://www.ir-tmca.com