Leger
ACHIEVEMENT(S): Leger was one of the most active artists of the first half of the 20th century.
DATE OF BIRTH: February 4, 1881
PLACE OF BIRTH: Argentan, France
DATE OF DEATH: August 17, 1955
PLACE OF DEATH: Gif-sur-Yvette, France
DISCIPLINE: Fine Arts
FIELD: Painting, illustration, printmaking, set design, film making
LANGUAGE/S: French and English
EDUCATION: Ecole des Arts Décoratifs
MAJOR-WORK/S: The Card Party (1917); Ballet mecanique (1924); Builders, Campers (1950)
PARENTS: Henri-Armand Léger and Marie-Adéle Daunon Léger
SPOUSE: First, Jeanne Lohy, second, Nadia Khodassievitch
SIBLINGS: none
CHILDREN: none
LIFE AND TIMES:
Leger’s father was a cattle breeder in Normandy who died when Léger was three years old. At the age of sixteen his mother sent him to Caen, France to apprentice with an architect.
In 1900, after two years apprenticeship, he moved to Paris, where he worked in an architect’s office as a draughtsman. After mandatory military service (1902-1903) Leger attended the Ecole des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. He had failed the entrance exam to the more prestigious Ecole des Beaux-Arts, but attended classes at the studios of its instructors, Jean L. Gérome and Gabriel Ferrier.
In 1908 Leger rented a studio at the artist’s settlement La Ruche (The Beehive). There he met many young artists, including the painters Chagall* and Modigliani* and the writer Apollinaire*.
Leger began to attend avant-garde gatherings in Paris. Leger was introduced to Cubism when he saw paintings by Braque* at the gallery owned by the art dealer Daniel Henry Kahnweiler. Leger began frequenting the gallery and eventually met and was influenced by Picasso*. By 1910 Leger was painting in a markedly Cubist style. He would later destroy almost all of the work he produced between 1900 and 1909. In 1913 Leger signed an exclusive three year contract with Kahnweiler, Picasso’s and Braque’s dealer.
At the start of World War I Leger was drafted and sent to the front in 1914. During a brief leave in 1916 Leger and his friend Apollinaire saw their first film by Chaplin*, which sparked a lifelong fascination with the cinema in Leger. After being gassed while at the front Leger was hospitalized for eleven months. In 1918 he was released from the military and in 1919 he married Jeanne Lohy.
In late 1914 Leger’s dealer Kahnweiler had been forced to close his gallery because of his German ancestry. Approximately two-thirds of the work Leger produced between 1911 and 1914 was confiscated from Kahnewiler by the French state as enemy property.
In the mid 1920’s Leger was associated with the movement known as Purism. The architect and painter Le Corbusier* and the painter Amedée Ozenfant published their Purist manifesto in 1918. Purism opposed Cubism on the grounds that it was becoming too theoretical and decorative and out of touch with the machine age. Purism maintained that the clean, functional lines of machinery should guide the artist’s design.
Leger managed effectively to merge the two genres, bringing together painstaking Cubist analysis of form with Purist simplification and machine-like polish of design components. He retained from his Cubist period a preference for cylindrical and tube-like motifs to suggest machine parts such as pistons and cylinders.
In 1924 Leger and Ozenfant founded the Acacdémie de l’Art Moderne at Leger’s studio. Ozenfant left in 1929, but Leger remained as its director until 1930. In 1934 Leger opened the Académie de la Grande-Chaumiére in Paris.
Leger’s experiences during World War I changed the direction of his work. He felt he had met “the people,” and that his art needed to be relevant to them. In 1917 he completed his first painting in which he deliberately took the subject from his own times and experiences. The Card Party (La Partie de Cartes) (1917) is based on studies Leger made of soldiers playing cards at the front. The work also represents a transition to Leger’s machine-oriented work of the 1920s. Leger’s machine-inspired elements were at least partially the result of his wartime experiences with military hardware and the appreciation he had for its design.
In the 1930s Leger advocated a realism that was more accessible and relevant to the general public. He recognized the power of contemporary forces such as radio, advertising, film and photography.
Leger’s generation had witnessed an unprecedented transformation of everyday life. They saw candlelight replaced by electricity and horses replaced by automobiles and airplanes. Society was switching from a predominantly rural society to an increasingly urban one.
Leger embraced the modern city, and the mechanization of life, perhaps more than any other artist of the early 20th century. Leger was one of the first artists to incorporate images of ordinary mass-produced objects, such as a can of sardines or an umbrella, in his paintings,.
Léger visited the United States for the first time in 1931, stopping in New York and Chicago. He returned to New York in 1935 when his work was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art. In 1940 Leger moved to New York in order to escape the German army’s occupation of Paris. Shortly after his arrival he began teaching at Yale.
He maintained a studio in New York City and kept in contact with other exiled artists living and working in the city such as Chagall, Duchamp*, Mondrian*, and Ozenfant. Leger taught at Mills College in Oakland, CA in 1941.
Leger returned to France in December of 1945. He had been sympathetic to the Communist Party since the mid-30s, but he did not officially join the Party until 1945. Leger became very involved in the Party’s activities, especially in causes related to peace. He was a founding member of the first National Council of the World Peace Movement in 1948. Leger also reopened his academy after the war. Leger had numerous students, including many American artists benefiting from the GI Bill. Leger encouraged workers from the nearby Renault car factory to attend classes.
There is almost no media that Léger did not explore. His ceaseless effort to reach the people he had encountered during World War I, and his desire to bring his art closer to their lives, spurred him to constantly explore different media.
He designed sets and costumes for the operaBolivar (1949)and the ballet Skating Rink (1921), based on Charlie Chaplin’s film The Rink. He conceived, produced and directed the non-narrative film Ballet mécanique (1924), on which he collaborated with Man Ray and Dudley Murphy. The film utilized fast-paced montages of mechanical images and body parts.
He created large-scale mosaics for building facades, painted numerous building murals, and was also a printmaker. He provided illustrations for numerous books, including André Malraux’s* Paper Moon (Lunes en Papier) and a book of poems devoted to Charlie Chaplin. In the 1950s Leger began to work in still more new media such as stained glass, ceramics and tapestry.
Leger’s wife died in 1950 and in 1952 he married Nadia Khodassievitch, his student since 1924. He continued to produce works and travel throughout Europe until his death.
ASSESSMENT: Leger was influenced by modern technology and is remembered primarily for his “machine-like” paintings, although he was prolific in numerous media.
EXTRA CONNECTIONS: He knew and worked with Calder*.
He corresponded with Eisenstein*
His early work was influenced by Cezanne*
ONELINER: Fernand Leger, prolific 20th century French artist.
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Encyclopedia Britannica.
Fry, Edward F., Robert T. Buck, and Charlotta Kotik. Fernand Léger. With a foreword by Robert T. Buck. Buffalo, New York: The Buffalo Fine Arts Academy, 1982.
Greenhalgh, Michael. “Léger, Fernand” The New Grove Dictionary of ArtOnline ed. L. Macy.
Kosinski, Dorothy, ed.,Fernand Léger: The Rhythm of Modern Life. With a foreword by Katharina Schmidt and Gijs van Tuyl. New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994.
Schmalenbach, Werner.Léger, Translated by Robert Allen. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1985.