Fernand Léger

Fernand Léger (Argentan, 1881 – Gif-sur-Yvette, 1955) was a French painter of the first half of the twentieth century whose work begins in Cubism and moves toward a figurative style of simplified forms and a popular tone. He also worked as a filmmaker, stage designer and muralist, but painting remains the core of his legacy. He matters because he turned the machine, the city and the human figure into subjects for a painting of crisp outlines and flat colour, and because his way of simplifying modern life has led part of the critical tradition to place him among the forerunners of Pop Art.

Training in Normandy and Paris

He was born in Argentan, into a farming family, and lost his father before he was two. He studied at the village school and at a religious institute in Tinchebray. Between 1897 and 1899 he was apprenticed to an architect in Caen, and in 1900 he moved to Paris, where he worked as an architectural draughtsman while attending the Académie Julian. After military service he failed to win a place at the École des Beaux-Arts and attended as a non-enrolled student, taking lessons from Gérôme and Gabriel Ferrier. He visited the Louvre often, and his early formation was rooted in Impressionism, whose work he had seen in the galleries of the rue de Laffitte. His first paintings, from 1905, still show that influence. He later described those years of study as “three empty and useless years”, and he did not begin to work seriously as a painter until he was about twenty-five.

Cézanne, Picasso and “Tubism”

The Cézanne retrospective of 1907 pushed his work toward drawing and geometry. That same year he came into contact with the early Cubism of Picasso and Braque. In 1909 he moved to Montparnasse, where he met Archipenko, Lipchitz, Chagall, Csaky and Delaunay. His major painting of this period, Nudes in the Forest (1909–1910), probably takes its inspiration from Picasso’s 1908 picture of the same title. He turns the subject into a room full of gadgets and robot-like figures, with sober colours set against a near-frantic activity. Critics named his personal Cubism “Tubism”, for its emphasis on cylindrical forms. In 1910 he exhibited alongside Braque and Picasso at Kahnweiler’s gallery, and in 1912 he had his first solo show there.

Between 1912 and 1913 he began investigating machine-like forms rendered in primary colours. Contrast of Forms (1913) illustrates that phase. It draws near Delaunay’s ideas about colour contrast, yet keeps the strong three-dimensionality of his earlier work. His fascination with geometry and bright colour often brought him to the edge of abstraction, though he always stepped back. In The Staircase (1914) he returns to the figure and its surroundings, now built from the abstract forms of the previous years. Léger never adopted the collage technique that Braque and Picasso had pioneered.

War and the mechanical period

Mobilised in August 1914, he spent two years at the front in the Argonne. During that time he drew many sketches of artillery pieces, aeroplanes and fellow soldiers. In September 1916, at Verdun, he nearly died after a mustard gas attack. While convalescing in Villepinte he painted The Card Players (1917), whose stiff, almost robotic figures reflect his experience of the war. He later recalled that the sight of the breech of a 75-millimetre gun in sunlight made him forget the abstract art of 1912 and 1913, and that he wanted to paint with the colour and energy of the soldiers’ slang.

That episode opens his “mechanical period”, in which figures and objects are rendered in sleek tubular and machine-like forms. In 1918 he began the Disk series, in which circles resembling traffic lights play a prominent part. In December 1919 he married Jeanne-Augustine Lohy, and in 1920 he met Le Corbusier, who would remain a lifelong friend. The City (1919) is a key work of these years. It controls the sculptural look of his figures through architectural rigidity and asserts the flatness of the picture plane, with balanced planes and zones of pure, clearly bounded colour. The human figures become depersonalised, adapted to the urban setting.

Cinema, murals and Purism

In the early 1920s Léger became interested in film. He collaborated with the writer Blaise Cendrars on some films and designed sets and costumes for Rolf de Maré’s Ballets suédois. In 1923–1924 he designed the set for the laboratory scene in Marcel L’Herbier’s L’Inhumaine. In 1924, with George Antheil, Man Ray and the filmmaker Dudley Murphy, he co-produced and co-directed Ballet mécanique, a film without narrative made of close-ups of ordinary objects, lips and teeth, and rhythmic images of machines and human activity. That same year he founded, with Amédée Ozenfant, the Académie Moderne, a free school where he taught from 1924.

His Purist phase, close to Le Corbusier and Ozenfant, reached its peak in The Siphon (1924), a still life based on a press advertisement for the aperitif Campari, whose fluted shapes suggest classical columns. In 1925 he produced his first murals for Le Corbusier’s Pavillon de l’Esprit Nouveau at the International Exhibition of Decorative Arts. Through the 1920s and 1930s he remained open to outside currents, and some of his paintings show the influence of Kandinsky, De Stijl and Surrealism. Three Women (1921) presents depersonalised figures, mechanical volumes against a geometric background, with an Art Deco air. Nude on a Red Background (1927) shows his monumental, expressionless figure in its purest form.

The United States and the return to France

He first visited the United States in 1931, and in 1935 the Museum of Modern Art in New York presented an exhibition of his work. In 1938 he was commissioned to decorate Nelson Rockefeller’s apartment. From 1940 to 1945 he lived in the United States because of the Nazi occupation of France. He taught at Yale University and found inspiration in industrial debris: abandoned machines with plants growing through them and birds perched on top. What he called the “law of contrast” led to works such as The Tree in the Ladder (1943–1944) and Romantic Landscape (1946). Three Musicians (1944), which reprised a composition of 1930, plays with the contrast between the figures and their instruments. During his American years he also began using freely arranged bands of colour alongside black-outlined figures, an innovation he credited to the neon signs of Broadway.

He returned to France in 1945 and joined the Communist Party. His painting became less abstract, and he produced large figure compositions of popular life: acrobats, builders, divers and country outings. His aim was to depict the ordinary person and to make art for him, grounded in a humanism rather than a strict Marxism. He also produced book illustrations, murals, stained-glass windows, mosaics, polychrome ceramic sculptures and stage sets.

Final years and legacy

After the death of Jeanne-Augustine Lohy in 1950 he married Nadia Khodossevitch in 1952. That year, two of his murals were installed in the General Assembly Hall of the United Nations headquarters in New York. In his last years he designed mosaics and stained-glass windows for the Central University of Venezuela in Caracas, and he began a mosaic for the São Paulo Opera that he did not live to finish. In 1955 he won the grand prize of the São Paulo Biennial. He died suddenly at his home in Gif-sur-Yvette that same year. The Fernand Léger Museum opened in Biot in 1960.

Among his pupils were Asger Jorn and Tarsila do Amaral. In 1945 he wrote that the object must become the main character of modern painting, and that once the human form itself became an object it could greatly free the modern artist. As the first painter to adopt the imagery of the machine age and to make the objects of consumer society his subjects, he is regarded as a progenitor of Pop Art. His most lasting contribution is a way of seeing modern technology and everyday life with an almost classical clarity.