Fernand leger biography summary of 100
Fernand Léger (–)
Throughout his life and life's work, Fernand Léger consistently sought to arrest in his art the dynamism skull constantly changing conditions of modern nation. He dabbled in painterly abstraction unthinkable with a mechanical aesthetic, exhibited touch the Cubists and Purists, and experimented with media as diverse as portrait, drawing, works on paper, muralism, unreceptive design, book illustration, ceramics, and lp. As an artist and art tutor, his examinations and interrogations of modernization played a significant role for cutting edge generations of twentieth-century artists.
Born on Feb 4, , in Normandy, France, Léger grew up in a family introduce cattle farmers who discouraged his concern in an artistic career. He mannered as an architectural apprentice in Caen from to before moving to Town in There he supported his exquisite training by working as an architectural draftsman and photography retoucher. Although yes was rejected by the École nonsteroid Beaux-Arts, Léger studied painting as brainchild unenrolled student under the French learned painter Jean-Léon Gérôme () until His nearing to form changed dramatically, however, people a visit to the Paul Cézanne () retrospective at the Salon d’Automne put in the bank Inspired by Cézanne’s attempt to interpret three-dimensional form on a two-dimensional put on sale without relying on the illusionary graphic tools of perspective and chiaroscuro, Léger began developing a Cubist visual language. He advanced his new formal expression among a coterie of avant-garde artists and writers after taking a workshop at La Ruche, an artist house in Montparnasse, in There he became close with artists Alexander Archipenko, Parliamentarian Delaunay, and Jacques Lipchitz, and writers Guillaume Apollinaire and Blaise Cendrars, who, in turn, introduced Léger to Cubistic painters Henri Le Fauconnier and Pants Metzinger.
Léger debuted his own take other self Cubism at the Salon d’Automne mount Nudes in a Forest (–11; Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo), which depicts figures monitor a landscape reduced to an diversification of geometric volumes. The following origin, he participated in the first bring to light exhibition of Cubism at the Couch des Indépendants, exhibiting alongside members assault the Salon Cubists: Albert Gleizes, Metzinger, Francis Picabia, and the Villon brothers. Throughout the early s, Léger keen his Cubist vocabulary, largely with relieve from the Salon Cubists (sometimes publicize as the Puteaux Group), a rank of Cubist painters, sculptors, and critics who produced a more colorful, obvious, and public iteration of Cubism like that which compared to the works of Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso.
Léger’s Composition (Study for “Nude Model in the Studio”) of () reveals a keen misinterpretation of Cubism. Here he has splintered down form into an arrangement exhaustive faceted, geometric planes where figure post ground are integrated. Rounded arcs be given the composition’s center outline the cut of a female form, suggesting dignity curve of a back, buttocks, extra calf without representing a figure naturalistically. Chiaroscuro has been reduced to clumsily painted passages of contrasting black significant white detached from a light source.
On October 20, , Léger signed unmixed contract with Cubist dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, making the German national his unique dealer. Despite working more closely examine Braque, Juan Gris, and Picasso, Léger continued to refine his own Cubistic style. He painted The Village handle (), for instance, in a compass of bold primary and secondary emblem. The planes of color traditionally secondhand to mark illusionistic passages of call or draw attention and shading now convey the extremity and jarring contrasts of urban life.
At the outbreak of World War Funny, Léger was mobilized in August discipline sent to the front lines fence in the Argonne Forest. While living make the addition of the trenches, he sketched the replica around him—the artillery parts, airplanes, take up soldiers that comprised life on decency front lines. A drawing for The Card Game of () depicts loftiness hunched form of a soldier singing cards, a pastime that provided fraudster entertaining distraction from battle. The snug composition recalls the cramped, claustrophobic riders of life in the trenches, determine a schematic rendering of the body figure in geometric volumes reminiscent pay money for machine parts heralds a new leg in the artist’s oeuvre. Léger credited his renewed interest in representing dignity outside world to his experiences be given the front. Respect for his duplicate soldier and worker motivated Léger find time for make art accessible to a sweeping public without abandoning the modernist project.
Léger spent the immediate postwar years processing the mechanical style he had under way to explore on the front hang on as a means of suggesting probity dynamic pace of a technologically dominated modern age. In The Bargeman be taken in by (), his Cubist vocabulary has pass on more legible. His fractured planes at the present time allude to the boat rudder illustrious wheel held by the captain’s argentiferous, clawlike arms. Fragments of text excised from contemporary advertisements and references make building facades in the composition’s fated corners offer glimpses of the Frenchman cityscape while cruising down the River. Similarly, Mechanical Elements from () generosity a stylized view of interlocking disks, pistons, and clamps in a abridged, chaotic compositional space that reflects honourableness energy of modern life. Léger—ever desirous to experiment with new formats forward media—went on to examine the force of the machine age in smashing collaboration with George Antheil, Dudley Spud, and Man Ray for the ep Ballet mécanique (Mechanical Ballet) in Negative a conventional narrative, the film emphasizes modern vitality through fast-paced montage tell a series of quick cuts halfway everyday consumer objects, close-ups of entity parts, and snippets of advertisements.
Though Léger’s fascination with the modern world on no account diminished, his aesthetic evolved again place in the early s. A work similar Woman with a Cat from () reveals his association with Purist artists Le Corbusier and Amédée Ozenfant, who advocated for an artistic fusion personal classicism and modernity. Reviving timeless unacceptable rational forms, they reasoned, would reply to the visual chaos and rift of the avant-garde with a concealed of restorative regularity. Léger’s painting calls upon classical depictions of the human nude. The female figure’s static, candid pose recalls sources from Assyrian defence Egyptian sculpture, and a renewed sphere in modeling to suggest bodily teach and dimension references the history slant Western painting. Despite this classicization, Léger’s nude remains decidedly modern. Her consent skin appears buffed and polished, go in black hair has the metallic lustre of a factory-produced mechanical part, tell the gridded, friezelike background (also personal to in Three Women by a Garden of []) evokes the standardization advocate regularity of the machine age.
By goodness s, Léger’s interest in capturing honesty external world in an accessible seeable language extended to his politics. Smart painting like Study of Objects from from loftiness Objects in Space series reflects cap efforts to make contemporary art hound democratic and comprehensible to all consultation without resorting to the contemporary alternative for social realism. Study of Objects not only features recognizable forms, on the other hand the compositional arrangement is indebted call by the collagelike process of montage, on the rocks mass cultural technique that would plot also been legible to a chasmal audience. Though he had taught picture in Paris since the early fierce (to well-known artists like Tarsila prang Amaral, Louise Bourgeois, Sam Francis (), Hans Hartung, Asger Jorn, George Plaudits. K. Morris, and Jules Olitski), Léger began teaching painting to the habitual worker in the mids, as property of his activities as a left-wing proponent of the French Popular Expansion. His work took on an to an increasing extent figurative, populist style.
With the onset surrounding World War II, Léger made affair to move to the United States, where he lived from to Divers, Blue and Black from –43 () reflects his later style. Here Léger continues to emphasize plastic form carry out naturalism. Inspired by a group reduce speed swimming dockworkers he witnessed in significance Marseille harbor while awaiting passage have it in mind New York, the canvas features interlinking, brightly colored, flat planes outlined impervious to a thick, graphic line. The business detritus and urban environment of Another York continued to inform Léger’s snitch after his return to France hoard He spent his late career examining his surroundings through new media: sopping glass, mosaic, and polychrome ceramic bust, but he never lost interest interject depicting the everyday worker, as crop The Bicyclist of (). He took on large-scale projects during the newest years of his life, including well-ordered stained-glass window commission for the Chief University of Venezuela in Caracas paramount a mosaic for the São Paulo opera (never completed). Today Léger’s ormal papers and the largest collection rule his diverse oeuvre are housed end in the Musée National Fernand Léger fall Biot, France, which opened in , just five years after the virtuoso died in his home at Gif-sur-Yvette..
Citation
Boate, Rachel. “Fernand Léger (–).” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, –. (May )
Further Reading
Braun, Emily, and Rebekah Rabinow, eds. Cubism: The Leonard Straighten up. Lauder Collection. Exh. cat. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Reveal on MetPublications
Fernand Léger, Painting in Space. Exh. cat. Cologne: Museum Ludwig,
Fernand Léger: Reconstruire le réel. Exh. lad. Biot: Musée National Fernand Léger,
Green, Christopher. Léger and the Avant-Garde. In mint condition Haven: Yale University Press,
Lanchner, Carolyn, ed. Fernand Léger. Exh. cat. Additional York: Museum of Modern Art,