Biographie

1881–1955

Born in 1881 in Argen­tan, North West France, Fer­nand Léger, who would lat­er car­ry the sobri­quet of ‘peas­ant of the avant-garde’ decid­ed to study archi­tec­ture. How­ev­er, at his arrival in Paris in 1900, he changed direc­tion in favour of paint­ing. Hav­ing failed the entry exam of the ‘École des Beaux-Arts’ Léger fre­quent­ed sev­er­al artists’ stu­dios whilst con­cen­trat­ing on draw­ing. Hav­ing set­tled in Mont­par­nasse, the cra­dle of Mod­ern Art, Léger befriend­ed the painters Robert Delau­nay and Marc Cha­gall, as well as the poets Blaise Cen­drars, Guil­laume Apol­li­naire and Max Jacob. The young Léger adhered to Post-Impres­sion­ism. As his style devel­oped dra­mat­i­cal­ly dur­ing 1902–1908 Matisse grad­u­al­ly destroyed most of this ear­ly production.

The land­mark Paul Cézanne ret­ro­spec­tive of 1907 left a last­ing impres­sion and as of 1910 Matisse turned towards the Cubist exper­i­ments of Georges Braque and Pablo Picas­so. He joined the ‘Sec­tion d’Or’ group which unit­ed Albert Gleizes, Jean Met­zinger, Hen­ri Le Fau­con­nier and the broth­ers Duchamp. Despite his desire to cre­ate a non-fig­u­ra­tive real­i­ty as pre­scribed by Cubism, Léger always remained more loy­al to the visu­al than to the intel­lec­tu­al side of Cubism.

At the time, Léger was rep­re­sent­ed by the deal­er Daniel-Hen­ry Kah­n­weil­er and par­tic­i­pat­ed in many exhi­bi­tions in Paris, Moscow, and at the New York Armory Show in 1913. His research focussed on the con­trast of geo­met­ri­cal forms in order to cre­ate an antag­o­nis­tic dynam­ic as a reflec­tion of the mod­ern world; his paint­ings dis­played move­ment in the oppo­si­tion of tubu­lar vol­umes, shapes, con­tours, black lines and pure colour, a style which the art crit­ic Louis Vaux­celles named ‘Tubisme’.

Dur­ing the Great War, Léger was assigned the task of stretch­er bear­er, which left him some time for drawing.

In 1917, Léger signed a con­tract with the leg­endary art deal­er Léonce Rosen­berg of the gallery ‘L’Effort Mod­erne’. Fol­low­ing the end of the Great War, Léger pro­duced large paint­ings dis­play­ing his inter­est in the mod­ern world of the urban indus­tri­al land­scape and the con­fronta­tion between man and machine. His affec­tion for the mod­ern world led him to the rel­a­tive­ly new medi­um of cin­e­ma. As such he co-direct­ed ‘Bal­let Mécanique’ with the Amer­i­can film-mak­er Dud­ley Mur­phy in 1924.
Dur­ing the sec­ond half of the 1920s, Léger intro­duced his more ‘sta­t­ic’ works such as ‘La lec­ture’ of 1924 and con­cen­trat­ed on the notion of the so-called ‘Fig­ure-Object’.

Léger was seri­ous­ly invest­ed in teach­ing and in 1924 he found­ed with Amédée Ozen­fant the ‘Académie mod­erne’, a pri­vate school which would become the ‘Académie de l’art con­tem­po­rain’ in 1934. Dur­ing the 1930s Léger tried to rec­on­cile in his large murals the styles of the avant-garde with pop­u­lar art. At the out­break of the Sec­ond World War Léger crossed the Atlantic to set­tle in New-York. Upon his return to France in 1946, Léger took a stu­dio in the Parisian sub­urb of Mon­trouge and pur­sued his research into cre­at­ing an art that has a social func­tion, using imagery that all could com­pre­hend. Léger start­ed a series of paint­ings pop­u­lat­ed with con­struc­tion work­ers on build­ing sites. The mon­u­men­tal ‘Les Con­struc­teurs, état défini­tif’ com­plet­ed this series in 1950. Léger also turned his hand to fres­co-paint­ing, car­toons for stained glass for the Church of Aud­in­court, and sculp­ture as dis­played in ‘La Grande Fleur qui mar­que’ of 1952.
Léger died in 1955 in Gif-sur-Yvette near Paris. In 1960, the ‘Musée Nation­al Fer­nand Léger’ was inau­gu­rat­ed in Biot on the French Riviera.