Fernand Léger: A Modernist Master

The French painter Fernand Léger, born 1881, is primarily known for his cubist works, but also cultivated a wider range of artistic styles and went on to become one of the foremost artists of the early twentieth century. His work was influenced by various avant-garde designs, including Futurism, Purism, and the De Stijl movement. However, he was not constrained to follow these styles too closely and expressed his individuality as his work shifted between figuration and abstraction. Among his peers and contemporaries, only Picasso might match his skill, curiosity and dynamism.    

Léger's early cubist paintings such as Le Compotier sur la Table (1909) originate from a period immediately after he moved to Montparnasse, Paris. In this early period, his recognition began with the exhibition of Nudes in the Forest (1909-1910) at the 1911 Salon de Indépendants, and he continued to exhibit until the war. During this time he met contemporaries such as Picasso, Rousseau and Braque, but he developed an individual variety of the art movement, combining that movement’s analytical dissection of the type with a vocabulary of recurved shapes resembling cylinders, spheres and cones. The critic gladiator Vauxcelles dubbed this work ‘Tubist’; it absolutely was Léger’s initial mature vogue. 

In the Nineteen Twenties Léger( see info of Fernand Léger biography online) began to restore figures to his representational process, inspired by his admiration of human form during his war-time experiences, and this rendered his scenes a bit gentler and additionally amiable. He usually selected to target girls and families in domestic settings — a chief example being the 3 reclining nudes drinking tea in le grand déjeuner, from 1921. although set in a stylish, modern flat, the figures boast simplified volumes that (typical of Léger during this period) return to humanistic discipline.    In 1931 Léger created the first of three journeys to the United States, having been commissioned to embellish the New York flat of Lord Nelson, an industrialist. He came again in 1935 and 1938 to finish an identical endeavour for Wallace K. Harrison’s Consolidated Edison Building at the 1939-40 World’s Fair.    

In 1932 he resumed teaching at the Académie modern, a free faculty he had co-founded with Amédée Ozenfant in 1924. In 1935, simply four years from his initial visit, he was given a serious show at New York’s Museum of Contemporary Art.    

The latter half of the last decade saw the completion of the monumental mural paintings of Adam and Eve and Composition aux deux perroquets, a piece he thought to be one of his most vital. He conjointly created murals for expositions in Brussels and Paris, and set and costume styles for the Paris Opera.   

Léger’s murals of the late Nineteen Thirties were impressed by his belief that fashionable art may be an agent of modification, a way of cultivating a humanistic vision of an advanced socialist society. In 1935 a coalition of leftist and centrist parties, union labour and intellectuals shaped the Front Populaire in France. Léger believed this drawn the dawn of a brand new and probably transformational social consciousness — exactly the chance that might enable him to bring fashionable art out of the studio and into the everyday sensibility of the general public.    

He spent the war in America, wherever he created a series of paintings impressed by the chemical element lights of the recent dynasty. He returned to France in 1945 and, like Picasso, joined the French Communist Party. 

Léger believed that a vital a part of the period of time reconstruction was to bring a way of enjoyment to the lives of voters from all walks of life, and, for him, the circus drew the general public spectacle par excellence — a real art of the folks. You can now buy Fernand Léger paintings from Blouinartinfo!

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