Fernand Leger

See also: Leger

Fernand Leger (February 4th 1881, Nickel silver - August 17th 1955, Gif-sur-Yvette) is a painter French.

Known as “pioneer of the Cubism”, “peasant of the avant-garde” or “cubist”, it was one of the first to expose publicly work of orientation cubist, even if it were not itself a painter cubist - it had found his own style, described sometimes as “sandhog”. Its first works go back to 1905 and are of inspiration Impressionniste. A museum, built by his wife Nadia Leger and Georges Bauquier, is devoted to him to Biot in the the Alpes-Maritimes.

Biography

Its origins Normans, his physique of “rough splendid” that it allots to a father stockbreeder and his outspokenness often made pass Fernand Leger for the “peasant of the avant-garde”. At nineteen years, he discovers Paris of 1900. Leger will never achieve there the formation of Architecte which it came there to continue. Slowly, patiently impregnating dynamic movement of the City, it will exchange its scribing tool for the brushes: the insurance of a stable trade against the promise of a risky Freedom.

Since 1903, Leger divides a workshop with the painter André Mare. After its failure with the Art schools, he is exerted in various Académie S. Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, which will become its Marchand, thus remembers active Leger to draw naked almost every evening with the Académie of the Large Thatched cottage. There remains difficult to know what these drawings resembled. Leger says indeed to have destroyed between 1902 and 1908 most of his work progressively of their production. Perhaps they still contained some traces of the sentimentalism of the Jardin of my mother , painted in 1905, or of these Gamins to the sun (1907) that Apollinaire qualified “bathes of the evening postimpressionnists”. Without abusive interpretation, one can compare the destruction as of these drawings to a properly artistic act: while attacking his obsolete attempts, Leger maltreated already the tradition.

In 1907, like many Parisian painters, it is very marked by the retrospective devoted to Cézanne which directs its painting definitively. The same year, he discovers the cubism of Picasso and of Braque.

Leger defies Cézanne in pitiless a Compotier on the table (1909), undoubtedly registers there it already his fear of the great influence of the painter of Aix on him. The painter melts himself soon in the effervescence of the Parisian artistic life and, since 1908, works at the sides of Modigliani, Laurens, and especially Archipenko. Installed to the Hive in 1908, it binds with Blaise Cendrars, max Jacob and Guillaume Apollinaire and dialogs, in particular, with the painter Robert Delaunay.

This influence feels in 1910, in these Nus in the forest , which will make say to Guillaume Apollinaire “Mr. Fernand Leger still has the most inhuman accent of this room. Its art is difficult”, it completes them after almost two years of fight.

It paints in 1909 Couseuse , which opens its period cubist. Geometrical clusters of lines placed in a space run, the fabric is close to the massive figures of Picasso painted the same year. However, as of Nu in the forest (1909-1910), Leger proposes a personal Cubisme, even if it took certainly as a starting point the work of Picasso carrying the same title.

The subject is transformed into a room filled with artefacts and robots. In this work, Leger is detached from the doctrines of Cézanne which consisted in painting starting from the cylinders and of the cones. The sobriety of the colors as well as the frantic activity of the robots creates the atmosphere symbolic system of a new dehumanized world. Under certain aspects, it is an anticipation of Italian futurism. . In the beginning of the year fifty, it takes part with Jean Bazaine and Jean Moal in the decoration of the Église of the Sacred Heart of Audincourt, built in a working district of Audincourt (Doubs), for which it conceives the seventeen stained glasses of the Nef and the chorus and draws the paperboards of the Tapisserie located behind the high altar.

If it shares the concern cubist of creating a not-figurative realism, it is distinguished from the Montmartrean by imposing a Cubisme not intellectual, but visual. Its concern is not indeed to appear the totality of the object, but to distinguish each object in volume and plan within an ideal space.

It practices, according to Louis Vauxcelles, the “tubism”. Uncoupled, geometrical volumes are not static any more and indissociable, but autonomous, creating between them a dynamic antagonism. The interest which it dedicates to the dynamism, " reflection of the world moderne" , the conduit in 1911 to attend the workshop of Puteaux and to take part in the Section of Gold. It moves away from the topics intimists and traditional of Braque and Picasso, and painted contemporary subjects ( the level Crossing , 1912). It starts a series of contrasts of forms ( the Woman in blue , 1912), in which it reintroduces the color highly and briefly tries out the Abstraction. Apollinaire then baptizes the art of Robert Delaunay and Leger of cubism orphic (see orphism). However, if Delaunay preaches the supremacy of the color, Leger aspires to " a balance between the lines, the forms and the couleurs" (Leger).

Leger directed several schools of painting to Montrouge initially then boulevard of Clichy, with Montmartre. It made of many pupils who diffused his ideas in all the art of the 20th century in France (Pierre Faniest, Etienne Hajdu, Tonia Cariffa, Abner, Carlos, Rene Margotton…) but also in Scandinavia (Eric Olson, Franciska Clausen, Otto G. Carland…)

Works

Gallery

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