Joseph Fernand Henri Léger

A French painter, sculptor, master of the monumental decorative art, one of the grandees of the fine art of the early twentieth century.

The father of the future artist was engaged in cattle breeding and died when Fernan was only a few years old. Leger received his primary education at the church school in Tensecheb, and afterward, he studied architecture in Cannes.

Fernand Leger played an important role in the formation and dissemination of Cubism and laid the foundations for such avant-garde trends as Neoplasticism and Constructivism. The artist actively collaborated with Cubist group “Golden Section”, participated in the exhibitions “Salon of Independent”, “Autumn Salon” and avant-garde association “Style”, founded by Piet Mondrian in the Netherlands and the Russian “Jack of Diamonds”. His interest in the possibility of synthesis of the arts led to the development and implementation of several architectural and design projects. The artist also clearly manifested himself in the field of applied creativity, scenography, cinema and book graphics. Together with Ozenfant, he founded The Free Art School, and later The Contemporary Art Academy. From 1940, the artist lived in the United States, where he taught at Yale University and at Mills College in California and achieved much in promoting contemporary art trends in the country.

Key Ideas:

– First of all, Fernand Leger is known as one of the four great figures of Cubism, along with Picasso, Braque and Gris. Being an architect by education, the artist became early interested in the value of the figure and the plane in a picturesque painting. Following the teachings of Cezanne, he worked in a geometric style, paying special attention to the form of objects in his works and supplementing complex multidimensional compositions with dynamic, rich colors.

– The art of Leger has its own bright individual features and specialties. Unlike his fellow Cubists, he avoided using separate, unrelated fragments, and did not support the idea of ​​analytical Cubism, where objects lose their outlines, smoothly flowing into each other.

– He worked only with distinct and clear forms, sometimes outlining them with a thick dark line, and sometimes dividing them with the help of color and tonal contrasts. The peculiarity of the author’s work is the use of original tubular forms, for which his art is even called a special term – “tubizm”. This is seen most clearly in the paintings “Naked in the Forest” (1910) and “The Village in the Forest” (1914).

– After 1918, a special interest in mechanical details emerges in the artist’s work, elements of various machines and modern designs appear in his paintings. Industrialized cities and the latest technological developments extensively impressed the artist, who genuinely admired the scientific progress and at the same time was afraid of it as a source of powerful strength and energy.

– Along with various mechanisms, people appear in Leger’s works. At first, they act only as a complement to the machine world, but later they begin to play more important roles, turning into the main object of the image in the artist’s work. Human figures gradually lose their resemblance to robots, gaining monumental forms and clearly decorative execution.

– F. Leger considered the accessibility of his paintings for the broad masses the main task of his work. Proceeding from this goal, he created many socially oriented works in the late period of his work.

– Depicting the modern reality, everyday life of the working people and their holidays, Leger tried to express the beauty of the human soul and its striving for perfection in accessible and simple ways. Among such works, there are “Entertainment” (1943), “Tourist” (1954), “Builders” (1950) and a number of other canvases, as well as wall paintings, mosaics and stained glasses created by the artist in several churches and public buildings.