1881 -1955 · Cubism, machine, modern color and public art

Cylinders, discs, primary colors, cities and robust figures give Fernand Léger a modern language designed for the machine as well as for collective life.

Fernand Léger was born in Argentan in 1881 into a Norman family. Apprentice with an architect in Caen, then an architectural designer in Paris, he acquired a lasting sense of construction. The Cézanne retrospective of 1907 and the encounter with Cubism transformed his painting. At La Ruche, through contact with Delaunay, Chagall and Cendrars, Léger developed a personal vocabulary of cylinders, cones, cubes and colorful contrasts. His series Contrastes de shapes, begun in 1912, pushed abstraction very far without renouncing the material energy of volumes. Mobilized during the First World War, he discovered machines, standardized objects and a human community in the trenches mixing all social classes. After 1918, mechanical elements, workers, tugs, towns and records became the subjects of clear, frontal and rhythmic painting. The human figure receives the same plastic value as a key, a bicycle or a panel. Léger does not, however, celebrate the machine alone: he seeks harmony between technology, leisure, work and color accessible to all. He experiments with film with Mechanical Ballet, decor, advertising, ceramics, mosaic, stained glass and mural painting. Exiled in the United States during the Second World War, he returned to France in 1945 and produced large compositions on builders, cyclists and leisure activities popular. An influential teacher and supporter of public art, he died in Gif-sur-Yvette in 1955. His work affirms that modernity can be monumental, readable and joyfully collective. The "Fernand Léger" selection notably compares La Femme en bleu and Les Disques. His reading favors color.

Léger treats man, machine and color as equal forces: their contrast produces the visible rhythm of modern life.