Fernand Léger

Fernand Léger (born February 4, 1881, Argentan, France—died August 17, 1955, Gif-sur-Yvette) was a French painter who was deeply influenced by modern industrial technology and Cubism. He developed “machine art,” a style characterized by monumental mechanistic forms rendered in bold colours.

Léger was born into a peasant family in a small town in Normandy. He served a two-year apprenticeship in an architect’s office at Caen, and in 1900 he went to work in Paris, first as an architectural draftsman and later as a retoucher of photographs. In 1903 he enrolled in the Paris School of Decorative Arts; although he failed to get into the École des Beaux-Arts, he also began to study under two of its professors as an unofficial pupil. Léger was profoundly influenced by a retrospective of Paul Cézanne’s work at the Paris Salon d’Automne of 1907.

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Cubism: Art and Artists

In 1908 Léger rented a studio at La Ruche (“The Beehive”), an artists’ settlement on the edge of Montparnasse and the seat of several avant-garde tendencies. He eventually met the painters Robert Delaunay, Marc Chagall, and Chaim Soutine; the sculptors Jacques Lipchitz, Henri Laurens, and Alexander Archipenko; and the poets Guillaume Apollinaire, Max Jacob, Blaise Cendrars, and Pierre Reverdy. Through the poets, in particular, Léger gained a connection with the Cubist movement; many of them were close friends with Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, the painters who had created Cubism in 1907.

Léger had been painting in a style that mixed Impressionism with Fauvism. Under the influence of his new environment, he abandoned those styles for a more Cubist approach. At the time, Picasso and Braque’s Cubist style entailed fracturing forms into multiple intersecting planes; Léger adapted their techniques to break down forms into tubular shapes. In 1909 he produced The Seamstress, in which he reduced his colours to a combination of blue-gray and buff and rendered the human body as a mass of slabs and cylinders that resembled a robot. His style was aptly nicknamed “tubism.”

By 1913 Léger was painting a series of abstract studies he called Contrast of Forms. He created these paintings to illustrate his theory that the way to achieve the strongest pictorial effect was to juxtapose contrasts of colour, of curved and straight lines, and of solids and flat planes. In 1914 he gave a lecture entitled “Contemporary Achievements in Painting,” in which he compared the contrasts in his paintings to the jarring appearance of billboards in the landscape. He argued that such developments should be embraced by painters as an affirmation of faith in modern life and popular culture.

During World War I, in which he fought as a sapper (military engineer) at the front lines, Léger acquired a new concern for making art accessible to the working classes. He also developed a renewed interest in cylindrical shapes, as found in weaponry. “Without transition,” he remembered, “I found myself at the level of the entire French people.…At the same time I was dazzled by the breech of a 75 [artillery piece] in full sunlight, by the magic of the light on the bare metal.…Total revolution, as man and as painter.” After being gassed at the Battle of Verdun, he was hospitalized for a long period and was finally released from the army in 1917. That year he completed The Card Party, which was based on sketches of his fellow soldiers. He regarded this work as “the first picture in which I deliberately took my subject from our own epoch.”

The Card Party marked the beginning of Léger’s transition into what has been called his mechanical period, which was characterized by a fascination with motors, gears, bearings, furnaces, railway crossings, and factory interiors. He attempted to depict the beauty of urban life by portraying humans as geometric and mechanized figures integrated with their equally geometric and mechanized environments. Three Women (1921) is considered to be the masterpiece of Léger’s mechanical period.

In the mid-1920s Léger was associated with the French formalist movement called Purism, which had been launched by the painter Amédée Ozenfant and the painter-architect Le Corbusier. Purism was an attempt to strip Cubism of its decorative aspects; Léger consequently adopted flatter colours and bold, black outlines in his work. From then on, his art was essentially figurative, and the only significant change in his style occurred late in his career, during World War II, when he began to draw his figures in gray and black and to use bands of colour as abstract background elements.

Léger also experimented with other media. In 1926 he conceived, directed, and produced The Mechanical Ballet, a purely non-narrative film with photography by Man Ray and Dudley Murphy and music by the American composer George Antheil. He also designed sets for ballets and motion pictures, and he created mosaics and stained-glass windows. Léger was interested in the relationship between colour and architecture, and he was able to realize some of his ideas in the mosaic facade of Notre-Dame de Toute-Grâce at Plateau d’Assy, in southeastern France (1949); in a mosaic for the crypt of the American memorial at Bastogne (1950); in a mural for the United Nations building in New York City (1952); and in several projects for stained-glass windows, such as those for Sacré-Coeur, a church in Audincourt, France (1951).

Léger joined the French Communist Party in 1945. During the last years of his life, his major paintings were The Constructors (1950) and The Great Parade (1954). Léger had hoped that these works, which depict the leisure activities of working-class people, would appeal to the general public, but they never achieved wide popularity.

Few 20th-century artists accepted the Industrial Revolution with as much enthusiasm as Léger displayed during his long and—although qualitatively uneven—remarkably consistent career. At Biot, in southern France, a museum is devoted to his work.