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Fernand Léger
Argentan, 1881-Gif-sur-Yvette, 1955
Léger was one of the leading artists of the Parisian avant-garde of the first half of the twentieth century.
Trained at the School of Architecture in Caen, in 1900 Léger moved to Paris where he worked as an architectural draughtsman and attended Gérôme and Gabriel Ferrier's academies. He was enormously influenced by the Cézanne retrospective in 1907, and as a result abandoned the Impressionist style of his first works and moved towards the language of the avant-garde. Léger associated with Cubist painters and with Apollinaire, and in 1910 he was taken on by the gallery owner and dealer Daniel-Henri Kahnweiler. While his first Cubist influenced works have a figurative content, his work became increasingly abstract from 1913 when he produced the series Contrast of Forms.
Léger was a member of the Puteaux group, a circle of artists that included Marcel Duchamp, Raymond Duchamp-Villon and Jacques Villon, all of whom were interested in the analogies between art, mathematics and music, influenced by the theories of the philosopher Henri Bergson. Léger exhibited with them in the Salons of the Section d'Or. He also had close links with the Russian avant-garde and with the Italian Futurists, and was very close to the painter Robert Delaunay.
During World War I Léger was called up and was eventually hospitalised. In the inter-war period his work shows the pronounced influence of the publication L'Esprit Nouveau, founded by the architect Le Corbusier in order to promote the aesthetic of the machine. Léger began his Machinist period in which his art reflects his fascination with the urban landscape of Paris. His painting Composition with Three Figures of 1932 marks the start of his interest in the human figure and of his highly individual interpretation of classicism, in line with the general trend towards a "return to order" evident in art at that time. During World War II, Léger moved to the United States where he worked as a professor at a number of universities. On his return to Paris, he joined the Communist Party.
To the end of his life, Léger continued to be highly prolific. He executed numerous wall paintings and became interested in stained glass, mosaic and tapestry.
Bauquier, G.: Fernand Léger. Catalogue raisonné de l'oeuvre peint. Paris, 1990.
Green, Ch.: The Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection. The European Avant-gardes. Art in France and Western Europe 1904-c.1945. London, 1995.
Lanchner, C.: Fernand Léger. Exhibiton catalogue The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1998.
Léger, F.: Fonctions de la peinture. Paris, 1965.
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