Fernand Léger was one of the French Cubists who revolutionized painting in the early 20th century. However, Léger’s artistic input is often unjustly dismissed by art writers and some historians. Instead of moving further towards abstraction, Léger took a step back and developed a truly modern figurative language. Take a look at the most important works of Fernand Léger and his unique interpretation of Cubism.
Fernand Léger: The Groundbreaking Cubist
Fernand Léger was one of the key figures in the development of Cubism and its mutation into other art movements at the beginning of the 20th century. Although Léger remains less known than Picasso and Braque, his contributions were no less important. While more radical forms of Cubism helped develop the language of abstract art, Léger’s effort focused on applying the newly invented artistic methods to figurative painting.
Léger started as a promising architect and a talented draftsman before falling under the charm of modern art and aligning himself with the Impressionists. Unfortunately, he destroyed the majority of his pre-Cubist works. Only a few of them survived, including the painting My Mother’s Garden, which was painted under the clear influence of Renoir and Monet. However, soon enough, impressionistic experiments with light and tone became boring to him. The definitive influence that forced him to change artistic direction was the 1907 retrospective of Paul Cezanne in Paris. Cezanne believed that any form could be simplified into an arrangement of geometric shapes like squares, circles, and triangles. From this concept, Cezanne’s followers developed the principles of Cubism: instead of a single plane, they painted their objects from several points of view at once.
Nudes in the Forest: Léger’s Key ‘Tubist’ Work
Cubist art had only one disadvantage: aiming to depict something in several physical states simultaneously, it had to remain static, frozen inside the limited artistic space. The solution to the problem came from another group of avant-garde artists, the Italian Futurists. Similarly preoccupied with geometry, the Futurists aimed to capture the dynamic movement of modern technology and machinery. Fernand Léger was familiar with Futurists’ inventions from their 1912 exhibition in Paris.
Nudes in the Forest was the first major work by Léger that clearly indicated his creative identity and illustrated his interpretation of the Cubist style. Unlike Picasso and Braque, who used flat forms to construct their multifaceted renderings of reality, Léger relied on cylinders and their variations. Consequently, art critic Louis Vauxelles invented the name Tubism for this unusual style.
Tubism was a one-man movement and a short-lived one. The color palette still adhered to the rules of Analytical Cubism and uses the same intellectualized approach to dissecting reality. In his writings, Léger divided artists into workers and engineers based on their mental input into a work’s composition, color, and arrangement. In his opinion, Henri Rousseau was a worker, and a hard one, for sure, but he was also the one who followed the principles laid in front of him by others. Cezanne, on the contrary, was an engineer, inventing and testing ideas of his own. Léger himself belonged to the second category, with deep thought behind all of his works, no matter how complex or simple they may have looked.
Léger’s Artistic Transformation: Back to Figuration
In the early years of his work, Léger, like many others of his generation, gravitated towards abstract art. He felt the need to disconnect from human form as much as possible and find the correct artistic language for his era. Still, his experiments soon took a radically different turn, bringing him back to the tradition of figurative art. The decisive shift in Fernand Léger’s career happened not due to any aesthetic experience or conceptual revelation but because of his service in World War I.
In October 1914, Léger started his military service as a sapper despite asking his superiors to appoint him for a more peaceful job. During his three years of service, he could not paint but kept drawing a lot, enclosing pencil images in letters to his wife. Many of them recorded the blood and suffering on the frontlines. In 1917, Léger was hospitalized, barely surviving a mustard gas attack in northeast France. His experience of wartime reality made him turn away from abstraction and switch back to realistic scenes of the working class, construction, and everyday activities. As the artist wrote in his notes, he learned more from the way light reflected from guns and the crude sincerity of men surrounding him in trenches than he did from all museums in the world.
One of the most significant traits of Fernand Léger’s art after the Great War was his preoccupation with primary color. For Léger, contrast was the ultimate expression of modern art and modernity in general. Art had to present a contrast to the natural realm rather than dissolving into it, thus illustrating the changing relationship between humanity and nature. Thus, artistic color had to look different from the one found in nature. Moreover, the use of simple primary colors helped to attract attention to the complexity of forms, volumes, and shapes on which Léger always relied.
The Mechanical Ballet
Apart from painting and sculpture, Fernand Léger tried his hand at the relatively new domain of film. Together with American film director Dudley Murphy, Leger created an experimental movie titled The Mechanical Ballet. Over the years, the extent of each creator’s influence blurred beyond any distinction, and today, it is almost impossible to separate Léger’s input from Dudley’s. However, some art historians connect the film’s subject matter to the artist’s traumatic experience during World War I and the impression of machinery causing mass destruction. The film is rather a collection of scenes, activities, and nauseating geometric patterns moving across the screen. It is usually considered part of Léger’s post-war “mechanical period,” during which he explored the distinction between humans and machines, as well as the nuances of mechanical motion.
Written by Murphey and Léger and filmed by none other than Man Ray, The Mechanical Ballet had another important figure of the era. Although there are no distinct characters in the film, the majority of screen time is occupied by Alice Prin, also known as Kiki de Montparnasse. A model of working-class origins, disowned by her mother for posing nude, Alice became a legendary figure among Parisian artists and creatives. She was a stage performer, a talented artist, and the woman behind many famous artworks.
Even without knowing her name, any art lover would recognize her from the paintings by Kees van Dongen and photographs by Man Ray. In The Mechanical Ballet, Kiki de Montparnasse poses as a being of unknown origin, equally capable of being a human and a machine. Her exaggerated facial expressions and movements both hypnotize and bring an unsettling feeling of unhealthy exaltation. Close-ups of her face, painted white with heavy eye makeup, became iconic source images for fashion photography and film history.
Fernand Léger: The Precursor of Pop Art
In 1945, Fernand Léger joined the French Communist Party. However, his political views did not make him entirely welcome within the working-class public. He seemed too bourgeois to them and too left-wing to the actual bourgeoisie. Léger’s work did not fit into the category of modernism in the same way as art by other famous artists of his time did. He was significantly less preoccupied with theories and ideologies than artists like Picasso or Malevich. Léger’s goal was to construct an artistic realm that would match the current state of reality without the necessary theoretical justification. His early architectural training helped him in engineering this realm based on several sources and influences.
Léger’s name, unfortunately, still remains slightly behind those of his more popular Cubist colleagues. Still, the artist’s input in the development of modern art was immense. Many art historians believe that Léger was one of the most important precursors of Pop Art. By choosing primary colors over the complexity of tones and flat, simplified images over the illusion of reality, he brought painting closer to the 1960s experiments of Lichtenstein and Warhol.
Léger’s subject matter was modernity and its specific everyday activities like work and leisure, depicted in a style radically different from the previously accepted. Léger believed that the fighters for the so-called good taste, who were unable to accept modernity in its various forms, were prisoners of their own habits. Similarly, pop artists would focus on consumption and the capitalist landscape, challenging the standards of the acceptable and unacceptable images to be painted.
