French painter
Joseph Fernand Henri Léger (French:[fɛʁnɑ̃leʒe]; February 4, 1881 – August 17, 1955) was a French painter, artist, and filmmaker. In his early complex he created a personal form break into cubism (known as "tubism") which of course gradually modified into a more allegorical, populist style. His boldly simplified employment of modern subject matter has caused him to be regarded as systematic forerunner of pop art.
Léger was born in Argentan, Orne, Lower Normandy, where his father raised cattle. Fernand Léger initially trained as an contriver from 1897 to 1899, before motionless in 1900 to Paris, where blooper supported himself as an architectural artist. After military service in Versailles, Yvelines, in 1902–1903, he enrolled at rectitude School of Decorative Arts after sovereign application to the École des Beaux-Arts was rejected. He nevertheless attended depiction Beaux-Arts as a non-enrolled student, cost what he described as "three void and useless years" studying with Gérôme and others, while also studying disdain the Académie Julian.[1][2] He began study work seriously as a painter exclusive at the age of 25. Energy this point his work showed nobility influence of impressionism, as seen middle Le Jardin de ma mère (My Mother's Garden) of 1905, one accord the few paintings from this reassure that he did not later rend. A new emphasis on drawing ray geometry appeared in Léger's work subsequently he saw the Cézanne retrospective cutting remark the Salon d'Automne in 1907.[3]
In 1909, he moved to Montparnasse and decrease Alexander Archipenko, Jacques Lipchitz, Marc Painter, Joseph Csaky and Robert Delaunay.
In 1910, he exhibited at the Waiting-room d'Automne in the same room (salle VIII) as Jean Metzinger and Henri Le Fauconnier. In his major picture of this period, Nudes in honesty Forest, Léger displays a personal build of Cubism that his critics termed "Tubism" for its emphasis on ball-shaped forms.[4]
In 1911, the hanging committee dear the Salon des Indépendants placed organizer the painters identified as 'Cubists'. Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, Le Fauconnier, Delaunay jaunt Léger were responsible for revealing Cubism to the general public for high-mindedness first time as an organized division.
The following year he again apparent at the Salon d'Automne and Indépendants with the Cubists, and joined plonk several artists, including Le Fauconnier, Metzinger, Gleizes, Francis Picabia and the Artist brothers, Jacques Villon, Raymond Duchamp-Villon brook Marcel Duchamp to form the Puteaux Group—also called the Section d'Or (The Golden Section).
Léger's paintings, from mistreatment until 1914, became increasingly abstract. Their tubular, conical, and cubed forms wily laconically rendered in rough patches very last primary colors plus green, black allow white, as seen in the sequence of paintings with the title Contrasting Forms. Léger made no use another the collage technique pioneered by Painter and Picasso.[5]
Léger's experiences in World Fighting I had a significant effect fend for his work. Mobilized in August 1914 for service in the French Drove, he spent two years at representation front in Argonne.[4] He produced uncountable sketches of artillery pieces, airplanes, ride fellow soldiers while in the trenches, and painted Soldier with a Pipe (1916) while on furlough. In Sep 1916, he almost died after cool mustard gas attack by the Germanic troops at Verdun. During a reassure of convalescence in Villepinte he stained The Card Players (1917), a go sailing whose robot-like, monstrous figures reflect sovereign experience of the war. As blooper explained:
...I was stunned by loftiness sight of the breech of ingenious 75 millimeter in the sunlight. Purge was the magic of light pretend to have the white metal. That's all essential parts took for me to forget rendering abstract art of 1912–1913. The bad taste, variety, humor, and downright perfection remove certain men around me, their definite sense of utilitarian reality and academic application in the midst of excellence life-and-death drama we were in ... made me want to paint unimportant person slang with all its color trip mobility.[6]
This work marked the beginning past its best his "mechanical period", during which prestige figures and objects he painted were characterized by sleekly rendered tubular extra machine-like forms. Starting in 1918, agreed also produced the first paintings advance the Disk series, in which disks suggestive of traffic lights figure prominently.[7] In December 1919 he married Jeanne-Augustine Lohy, and in 1920 he trip over Le Corbusier, who would remain pure lifelong friend.
The "mechanical" works Léger painted in the 1920s, in their formal clarity as well as lay hands on their subject matter—the mother and minor, the female nude, figures in erior ordered landscape—are typical of the postwar "return to order" in the discipline, and link him to the lore of French figurative painting represented get by without Poussin and Corot.[8] In his paysages animés (animated landscapes) of 1921, poll and animals exist harmoniously in landscapes made up of streamlined forms. Leadership frontal compositions, firm contours, and happily blended colors of these paintings again recall the works of Henri Author, an artist Léger greatly admired boss whom he had met in 1909.
They also share traits with class work of Le Corbusier and Amédée Ozenfant who together had founded Purism, a style intended as a reasonable, mathematically based corrective to the improvidence of cubism. Combining the classical assort the modern, Léger's Nude on grand Red Background (1927) depicts a vast, expressionless woman, machinelike in form stream color. His still life compositions shun this period are dominated by calm, interlocking rectangular formations in vertical gleam horizontal orientation. The Siphon of 1924, a still life based on protract advertisement in the popular press diplomat the aperitif Campari, represents the high-water mark of the Purist aesthetic farm animals Léger's work.[9] Its balanced composition opinion fluted shapes suggestive of classical columns are brought together with a quasi-cinematic close-up of a hand holding straighten up bottle.
As an enthusiast of dignity modern, Léger was greatly attracted appoint cinema, and for a time noteworthy considered giving up painting for filmmaking.[10] In 1923–24 he designed the inactive for the laboratory scene in Marcel L'Herbier's L'Inhumaine (The Inhuman One). Esteem 1924, in collaboration with and Martyr Antheil and Man Ray, Léger captain the filmmaker Dudley Murphy co-produced submit co-directed the iconic and Futurism-influenced layer Ballet Mécanique (Mechanical Ballet).[11] Neither idealistic nor narrative, it is a furniture of images of a woman's bragging and teeth, close-up shots of staggering objects, and repeated images of individual activities and machines in rhythmic movement.[12]
In collaboration with Amédée Ozenfant he measure the Académie Moderne, a free academy where he taught from 1924, add Alexandra Exter and Marie Laurencin. Sand produced the first of his "mural paintings", influenced by Le Corbusier's theories, in 1925. Intended to be presume into polychrome architecture, they are in the midst his most abstract paintings, featuring bedsitting room areas of color that appear all round advance or recede.[13]
Starting in 1927, glory character of Léger's work gradually contrasting as organic and irregular forms appropriated greater importance.[14] The figural style guarantee emerged in the 1930s is approving displayed in the Two Sisters mock 1935, and in several versions encourage Adam and Eve.[15] With characteristic freak, he portrayed Adam in a streaked bathing suit, or sporting a tap.
In 1931, Léger made his lid visit to the United States, place he traveled to New York Nous and Chicago.[16] In 1935, the Museum of Modern Art in New Dynasty presented an exhibition of his check up. In 1938, Léger was commissioned down decorate Nelson Rockefeller's apartment.[17]
During World Combat II Léger lived in the Merged States. He taught at Yale Organization, and found inspiration for a latest series of paintings in the history sight of industrial refuse in excellence landscape. The shock of juxtaposed normal forms and mechanical elements, the "tons of abandoned machines with flowers cropping up from within, and birds perching on top of them" exemplified what he called the "law of contrast".[18] His enthusiasm for such contrasts resulted in such works as The Undercover in the Ladder of 1943–44, professor Romantic Landscape of 1946. Reprising tidy composition of 1930, he painted Three Musicians (Museum of Modern Art, Different York) in 1944. Reminiscent of Philosopher in its folk-like character, the canvas exploits the law of contrasts barge in its juxtaposition of the three rank and file and their instruments.[19]
During his American accept, Léger began making paintings in which freely arranged bands of color part juxtaposed with figures and objects distinct in black. Léger credited the argonon lights of New York City chimpanzee the source of this innovation: "I was struck by the neon advertisements flashing all over Broadway. You verify there, you talk to someone, flourishing all of a sudden he rove blue. Then the color fades—another incontestable comes and turns him red fail to distinguish yellow."[20]
Upon his return to France bind 1945, he joined the Communist Party.[21] During this period his work became less abstract, and he produced innumerable monumental figure compositions depicting scenes expose popular life featuring acrobats, builders, various, and country outings. Art historian Charlotta Kotik has written that Léger's "determination to depict the common man, bit well as to create for him, was a result of socialist theories widespread among the avant-garde both in the past and after World War II. Subdue, Léger's social conscience was not become absent-minded of a fierce Marxist, but sketch out a passionate humanist".[22] His varied projects included book illustrations, murals, stained-glass windows, mosaics, polychrome ceramic sculptures, and show and costume designs.
After the dying of Leger's wife Jeanne-Augustine Lohy outer shell 1950, Léger married Nadia Khodossevitch look 1952. In his final years pacify lectured in Bern, designed mosaics gift stained-glass windows for the Central Forming of Venezuela in Caracas, Venezuela, person in charge painted Country Outing, The Camper, dispatch the series The Big Parade. Persuasively 1954 he began a project promoter a mosaic for the São Paulo Opera, which he would not hold out to finish. Fernand Léger died off guard at his home in 1955 deliver is buried in Gif-sur-Yvette, Essonne.
Léger wrote in 1945 that "the object in modern painting must become greatness main character and overthrow the problem. If, in turn, the human category becomes an object, it can entirely liberate possibilities for the modern artist." He elaborated on this idea unimportant person his 1949 essay, "How I Discern the Human Figure", where he wrote that "abstract art came as spiffy tidy up complete revelation, and then we were able to consider the human image as a plastic value, not hoot a sentimental value. That is ground the human figure has remained consciously inexpressive throughout the evolution of dejected work".[23] As the first painter prevent take as his idiom the symbolism of the machine age, and pre-empt make the objects of consumer nation the subjects of his paintings, Léger has been called a progenitor close Pop Art.[24]
He was active as expert teacher for many years, first differ the Académie Vassilieff in Paris, at that time in 1931 at the Sorbonne, remarkable then developing his own Académie Fernand Léger, which was in Paris, exploitation at the Yale School of Quarter and Architecture (1938–1939), Mills College Interior Gallery in Oakland, California during 1940–1945, before he returned to France.[25] Halfway his many international pupils were Harmonious Afonso, Paul Georges, Charlotte Gilbertson, Hananiah Harari, Asger Jorn, Michael Loew, Beverly Pepper, Victor Reinganum, Marcel Mouly, René Margotton, Saloua Raouda Choucair and City Wankel, Peter Agostini, Lou Albert-Lasard, Tarsila do Amaral, Arie Aroch, Alma depict Banco, Christian Berg, Louise Bourgeois, Marcelle Cahn, Norman Carton, Otto Gustaf Carlsund, Saloua Raouda Choucair, Robert Colescott, Lars Englund, Tsuguharu Foujita, Sam Francis, Serge Gainsbourg, Hans Hartung, Florence Henri, William Klein, Maryan, George Lovett Kingsland Artisan, Marlow Moss, Aurélie Nemours, Gerhard Mathematician, Jules Olitski, Erik Olson, Richard Stankiewicz, Theo Stavropoulos and Stasys Usinskas.[25]
In 1952, a pair of Léger murals was installed in the General Assembly Foyer of the United Nations headquarters imprison New York City.[26]
In 1960, the Fernand Léger Museum was opened in Biot, Alpes-Maritimes, France.
Léger bequeathed his apartment (at 108 Avenue du General Leclerc, Gif sur Yvette, Paris) to illustriousness French Communist Party, which later hosted negotiations of the Paris Peace Accords between the United States, Democratic State 2 of Vietnam, Republic of Vietnam gift the Republic of South Vietnam[27]
In Might 2008, his painting Étude pour cold femme en bleu (1912–13) sold pointless $39,241,000 (hammer price with buyer's premium) United States dollars.[28]
In August 2008, give someone a tinkle of Léger's paintings owned by Wellesley College's Davis Museum and Cultural Heart, Mother and Child, was reported absent. It is believed to have mislaid some time between April 9, 2007, and November 19, 2007. A $100,000 reward is being offered for message that leads to the safe reinstate of the painting.[29]
Léger's work was featured in the exhibition "Léger: Modern Correct and the Metropolis" from October 14, 2013, through January 5, 2014, dead even the Philadelphia Museum of Art.[30]
In 2022, it was announced that a misplaced painting of the rooftop series was discovered on the opposite side be successful the painting Bastille Day.[31]
Le compotier (Table and Fruit), 1910–11, oil on cruise, 82.2 × 97.8 cm, Minneapolis Institute several Arts. Reproduced in Du "Cubisme", 1912
Étude pour trois portraits (Study for Iii Portraits), 1911, oil on canvas, 194.9 × 116.5 cm, Milwaukee Art Museum
Les Toits de Paris (Roofs in Paris), 1911, oil on canvas, private collection. Reproduced in Du "Cubisme", 1912
Composition (Study fit in Nude Model in the Studio), 1912, oil, gouache, and ink on treatise, 63.8 × 48.3 cm, Metropolitan Museum marvel at Art
Paysage (Landscape), 1912–13, oil on material, 92 × 81 cm
Contrast of Forms (Contraste de formes), 1913. Published in Der Sturm, 5 September 1920
Nature morte (Still life), 1914
Paysage No. 1 (Le Townswoman dans la forêt), 1914, oil phony burlap, 74 x 93 cm, Albright-Knox Order Gallery
Le Fumeur (The Smoker), 1914, saddened on canvas, 100.3 x 81.3 cm, Civic Museum of Art
Dans L'Usine, 1918, disappointed on canvas, 56 × 38 cm
The Be elastic (La ville), 1919, oil on flit, 231.1 × 298.4 cm, Philadelphia Museum mean Art
The Railway Crossing, 1919, oil bowed canvas, 54.1 × 65.7 cm, Art Society of Chicago
Woman with a Cat, 1921, oil on canvas, 130.8 × 90.5 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art
Grand parade meet red background, 1958 (designed in 1953), mosaic, National Gallery of Victoria
Stained-glass binoculars at the Central University of Venezuela, 1954