LÉGER, Fernand (Argentan, 1881 – Gif-sur-Yvette, 1955)
Joseph Fernand Henri Léger was born on 4 February 1881 in the small town of Argentan in Normandy. After an early apprenticeship as an architect’s draughtsman in Caen, Léger moved to Paris and in 1903 enrolled in the École des Arts Décoratifs where he attended the classes of Jean-Léon Gérôme and Gabriel Ferrier. Léger gradually entered the Parisian avant-garde circles, meeting Delaunay, Chagall, Lipchitz, Jacob and Apollinaire among others. His early works, mostly landscapes, were marked by an Impressionist influence and were exhibited for the first time at the Salon d’Automne in 1907. The artist began to elaborate his personal vocabulary only after his encounter with Cézanne’s work in 1907. Beginning with the 1909 composition The Dressmaker Léger became a major interpreter of Cubism which he elaborated in a personal way that also came to be known as “Tubism” for the extensive use of tubiform shapes. In 1912 he presented Woman in Blue in the Duchamp-Villon’s “Cubist House” and that same year Daniel-Henri Kahnweiler held the artist’s first solo-show at his Parisian gallery, offering him a contract the following year. By that time Léger had been introduced to the Section d’Or, a group of artists, including Delaunay and Metzinger, that gathered at Villon’s house in Puteaux, a suburb near Paris. The contact with other avant-garde artists greatly spurred Léger’s experimentation with a new language that would express his belief in art as a non-imitative form of representation. Henceforth, the compositions of the period between 1912 and 1918 are characterised by the extensive use of contrasting geometrical volumes aimed at creating a dynamic effect as epitomised by works such as Contrasts of Forms (1913, New York, Museum of Modern Art) and Staircase (1914, Madrid, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza). With the advent of World War I Léger was sent to the front. The war experience left a made mark on the artist who from 1918, brought about a radical shift in his mode of expression. His compositions were now centred on the perception of the city and its inhabitants as dynamic components of the mechanical era. During the 1920s the painter executed a great number of large-scale works featuring his mechanised representation of the real as epitomised by the 1919 Men in the City today in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection and the 1924 series Mechanical Elements. In 1924 Léger realized Mechanical Ballets a film project based on fragments and the following year, together with Ozenfant and Le Corbusier, he presented a series of murals at the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels in the pavilion L’Esprit Nouveau. After a short period in which his work became close to Surrealism (i.e. Mona Lisa with Keys, 1930, Biot, Musée National Fernand Léger), Léger henceforward changed to Realism. In 1935 the artist travelled to the United States for both the Museum of Modern Art (New York) and the Art Institute of Chicago presented a retrospective of his oeuvre. Léger’s talent and experimentation were extensively celebrated during his lifetime both in France and abroad. In 1940 the artist moved to the United States escaping the horrors of World War II. There, he taught for a period at the Yale University and produced a great number of works, including the series of Bathers. It was not until 1946 that Léger returned to France where he became involved in political movements related to the Communist party. In his last years the painter focused on the representation of the ordinary man with the series of Builders and also devoted himself to applied arts such as ceramics, mosaics and stained glass. Fernand Léger died on 17 August 1955 at Gif-sur-Yvette.
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