This biography from the Archives of AskART:
| Please note: Artists not classified as American in our database may have limited biographical data
compared to the extensive information about American artists.
 One of the major Cubist painters in France in the early 20th Century,
Fernand Léger, also became a sculptor, ceramist, art educator and
filmmaker. He was born in Normandy where his father raised
livestock, and originally studied to be a re-toucher of photographs and
an architect's draughtsman. Between 1897 and 1899, he was
apprenticed to an architect in Caen, and then worked in Paris for two
years as a draughtsman followed by two years as a retoucher.
In 1903, he applied to the Ecole des
Beaux Arts in Paris but was denied admission, so he enrolled at the
Acdemie Julian and the Ecole des Arts Decoratifs. He also 'hung
around' the Beaux Arts Academy, studying with Jean Leon Gerome but
saying later that the experience was "three empty and useless
years".
However, he did begin to work seriously as a painter, first working in
a style influenced by Impressionism. Later he destroyed most of
the work of this period. In 1907, upon seeing the painting of
Cézanne at the Salon d'Automne, he adopted a more geometrical
style. By 1910, affiliated with the Puteaux Group, an offshoot of
the Cubist movement, and living among bohemian artists in Montparnasse
in Paris, he had adopted his own form of Cubism, which critics dubbed
'Tubism' because of the emphasis on cylindrical forms. Soon he
was
considered one of the country's three major Cubist painters along with
Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque but differed from then in that he did
not do collage, and he placed
curvilinear forms against rectilinear grids. In his stiriving for
a sense of action in his paintings with the curvilinear lines, Léger
was also much influenced by the Futurism of Italy.
During World War I, he was gassed in Verdun in 1916 during service in
the army, which he joined in 1914 and was at the front in
Argonne. He did many sketches of wartime subjects, especially
airplanes and guns and fellow soldiers and during convalescence in
Villepinte he painted The Card Players
(1917). This painting has been described as "a canvas whose
robot-like monstrous figures reflect the ambivalence of his experience
of war." (wikipedia) This work, reflecting his shock at the
realities of war, was the beginning of his 'mechanical' period, the
turning of his back on abstraction.
He devoted himself to depicting
common, real objects that he described as "everyday poetic images" and
that gave him a sense of returning to order. Cityscapes
and machine parts became subjects in his work as did nude females,
mothers and children, and animals grazing in landscapes. These
paintings had
very bold colors. Not everyone appreciated his work. Alfred
Barr, Director of the Museum of Modern Art, said that Léger was a
"noisy artist chasing fire engines, the business about him being a
champion of the machine, and the clever mot about 'Tubism' ".
In 1919, Leger married Jeanne-Augustine Lohy, and the following year
began a friendship with Le Corbusier, a French Swiss architect who
espoused modernism and became affiliated with the International Style.
In 1925, influenced by Le Corbusier, he did some mural decorating of
highly abstract designs with Robert Delaunay for the entry hall of the
exhibition Les Arts Décoratifs. He became affiliated with the
Purist Movement and the aesthetics of machines espoused by the Purists
and created paintings with that "were static, precise and polished
appearance of machinery." (artcult) He also did paintings with
gigantic objects isolated in space, created decor for theatres, and
experimenting with cinema, produced the "Ballet Mechanic", the first
film that did not have a script and one much influenced by
Futurism. It was a "series of images of a woman's lips and teeth,
close-up shots of ordinary objects, and repeated images of human
activities and machines in rhythmic movement." (wikipedia) At one
point he considered giving up painting for filmmaking
He lived in the United States during World War II, teaching at Yale
University and Mills College. He was much startled by the sight
of trash or refuse in landscape, the juxtaposition of junk with
flowers, and he did paintings reflecting these sights such as The Tree in the Ladder (1944) and Romantic Landscape (1946).
He returned to Paris after the war and opened an art
academy with Robert Brice, a former student. He became a member
of the communist party and again returned to a more realist style
focused on activities of common people. Reflecting his interest
in working classes and his
desire to make artwork understandable to them, he did large paintings
"celebrating the people, featuring acrobats, cyclists and builders,
thickly contoured and painted in clear, flat colours". (artchive)
From 1946 to 1949, he created a mosaic for the facade of the church at
Assy; in 1950, he founded a ceramics studio at Biot, which in 1957,
became the Leger Museum; in 1951; he completed windows for the church
at Ardincourt; and in 1954, he did windows for the University at
Caracas.
Leger's first wife died in 1950, and two years later he married Nadia Khodossevitch.
He died at his home in 1955, and is buried in Gif-sur-Yvette, Essone.
The Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris hosted a memorial
retrospective exhibition in 1956, and the next year one was held at the
Haus der Kunst in Munich. In 1998, the Museum of Modern Art in
New York City held a retrospective
of the work of Fernand Léger.
Sources:
http://artchive.com/artchive/L/leger.html (from The Bulfinch Guide to Art History)
http://www.artcult.com/leger.htm (Great Masters)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fernand_Léger (Credits: Buck, Robert T. et
al. (1982). Fernand Léger. New York; Cowling, Elizabeth; Mundy,
Jennifer (1990). On Classic Ground: Picasso, Léger, de Chirico and the
New Classicism 1910-1930; Eliel, Carol S. et al. (2001). L'Esprit
Nouveau: Purism in Paris, 1918-1925; Néret, Gilles (1993). F.
Léger. New York: BDD Illustrated Books.
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This biography from the Archives of AskART:
| Please note: Artists not classified as American in our database may have limited biographical data
compared to the extensive information about American artists.
 Fernand Léger was born in 1881, the same year both Picasso and Braque were born, in Normandy; his father was a substantial cattle grazer. Fernand was trained as an architectural draughtsman and later worked as a professional retoucher of photographs. He was an abstract painter before the War, in which he had a brilliant record. He had visited the United States twice. In France, he lived in a villa next to some railroad tracks in a Paris suburb, and a farm in Normandy where he raised pigs and made cider.
It is often said that Léger was the artist of the machine age, but he was not entirely a man of his time. He knew poverty as a child, was gassed in World War I, had to flee before the invading Nazis in World War II. But there is little of death and destruction in his work. Other men have painted with more passion, few with more exuberance.
Léger returned to France at the end of 1945 after spending the war years traveling and lecturing in the United States. There had been three previous visits to America in the 1930s, all entrepreneurial adventures of only modest success. He had resumed his practice of making public appearances to explain his art to a sometimes curious, sometimes bewildered public. In addition, he enjoyed many celebrity encounters, like a holiday with Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald, an evening at the theatre with James Joyce and friendships with Ezra Pound and Henry Miller. Léger died in 1955.
Written and submitted by Jean Ershler Schatz, artist and researcher from Laguna Woods, California.
Sources include:
Time Magazine, March 9, 1962 Leger's Popular Mechanics by Marcia E. Vetrocq in Art in America magazine, June 1998 |
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