Fernand Léger

Normandy and architecture

Fernand Léger was born on 4 February 1881 in Argentan, in Normandy, the son of a cattle farmer. His father died when he was young.[2]

He was apprenticed to an architect in Caen from 1897 to 1899, then moved to Paris in 1900 and worked as an architectural draughtsman. The training shows in everything he painted afterwards. He assembled his pictures from separate parts, the way a building is assembled from components, and the parts fit like machine parts.

He was refused entry to the École des Beaux-Arts and studied instead at the École des Arts Décoratifs and privately. He worked as a photographic retoucher to pay for it.[3]

Becoming a Cubist

Léger's early work was Impressionist. He said later that the Cézanne memorial exhibitions of 1907 made him give up Impressionism, and that it took him three years to work Cézanne out of his system.[4]

By 1909 he had moved to La Ruche, the cheap studio building in Montparnasse where Chagall, Soutine and Modigliani also worked. He met the poets Guillaume Apollinaire and Blaise Cendrars there, and the painters Robert Delaunay and Alexander Archipenko.

His Nudes in the Forest, painted between 1909 and 1911, was his first fully Cubist work, and it looks unlike anything by Picasso or Braque: the figures and the trees are built from the same grey and green metal tubes. When it was shown in 1911 a critic coined the word tubism, and it followed him for the rest of his life.[5]

The war

Léger was mobilised in 1914 and served for three years in the engineers and then as a stretcher-bearer, at Argonne and Verdun. He was thirty-three when he went.[2]

He drew constantly at the front, on any paper he could get, including the wooden ammunition boxes. What he drew was equipment and men: breech-blocks, gun barrels, aircraft, and soldiers reduced to the same cylinders as their weapons.

In September 1916 he was caught in a gas attack at Verdun and nearly died. He spent more than a year in hospital and convalescence, and was discharged in 1917.[6]

While convalescing he painted The Card Players, showing three soldiers at a game, their bodies made entirely of armour plate and pipework. It was the first time he painted the soldiers he had served with in his own machine style.[4]

The machine age

The war made Léger a populist. He had spent three years with miners, labourers and metalworkers, and he came out saying that they, not the salon public, were the people he wanted to paint for and paint about.

From 1918 he painted what he called the machine aesthetic. The City, in 1919, is a huge canvas of scaffolding, lettering, stencilled figures and hoardings. Three Women, in 1921, shows women reclining like polished engine parts. Dozens of other canvases are built from discs, gears and propellers.

He was not making fun of the machine and he was not warning about it. He thought a well-made machine part was as beautiful as anything in a museum, and that a modern painting should be built with the same precision.

Ballet Mécanique

In 1924 Léger made a film, Ballet Mécanique, with the American filmmaker Dudley Murphy and camera work by Man Ray. It has no story. It is nineteen minutes of close-ups of machine parts, kitchen implements, a woman's smile, a swinging pendulum and a washerwoman climbing stairs, cut into repeating rhythms.

The film treats objects and people identically: a mixing bowl gets the same attention as a face, and both are made to move like machinery. It was intended to have a score by the American composer George Antheil, though the music and the film were rarely performed together.

Ballet Mécanique is one of the first films made by a painter to be looked at like a painting instead of followed like a story, and it is still shown in courses on avant-garde film.

Teaching and murals

In 1924 Léger opened a free studio-school in Paris with Amédée Ozenfant, and he taught for much of the rest of his life. He also began working at architectural scale, arguing that painting belonged on the walls of ordinary buildings rather than in private collections.

He designed sets and costumes for the Ballets Suédois, made large decorative panels for exhibitions, and worked with architects including Le Corbusier. He joined the political left in the 1930s, and in 1945 he joined the French Communist Party. That matched what he had been saying since 1918: that art should be made for working people.

The American years

Léger visited the United States three times in the 1930s and was living there from 1940 to 1945, having left France after the German invasion.

He taught at Yale and at Mills College in Oakland, California, and lived mostly in New York. American subjects entered his painting: neon signs and industrial waste ground. He also returned to the divers he had watched at Marseille before sailing, who became the Divers series — figures tangled together in mid-air, their colour floating free of their outlines.

That device — flat bands of colour laid across a drawing that does not match them — became the basis of his late work.

Return and last years

Léger returned to France in 1945. His last decade was his most public. He made stained glass and a mosaic for the church at Audincourt, murals, ceramics and tapestries, and painted large canvases of construction workers and circus performers.

The Constructors, painted in 1950, shows steelworkers on girders against a blue sky, drawn with the flat clarity of a poster. He exhibited it in a factory canteen to see what the workers made of it.

His first wife, Jeanne-Augustine Lohy, died in 1950. He married the painter Nadia Khodasevich in 1952. In 1955 he bought a property at Biot, on the Riviera, intending to install large ceramics in the garden.

He died at Gif-sur-Yvette on 17 August 1955, aged seventy-four. The museum his widow and his collaborator Georges Bauquier built at Biot opened in 1960 and is now the Musée national Fernand Léger.

Why Fernand Léger matters

Léger took the machine seriously as a subject when most artists either ignored it or feared it, and he did it without either satire or dread. That gave twentieth-century painting a whole vocabulary — the piston, the propeller, the girder, the stencilled letter — and it fed directly into commercial art, poster design and, later, Pop art.

His second contribution is the ambition behind it. He wanted an art for people who worked with their hands, made at the scale of buildings rather than drawing rooms, and he spent thirty years on murals, glass, ceramics and teaching in pursuit of it. There is little evidence that the working audience he wanted ever came. The work he made trying to reach it is in museums, churches and public buildings across France.