James Picard - Artist of July 2005

***July 2005***

Fernand Leger
February 4, 1881 – August 17, 1955

Joseph Fernand Henri Léger was born in Argentan, France. After showing enthusiasm for art, drawing in particular, throughout his childhood and adolescence, Léger began apprenticing with an architect in Caen at the age of sixteen and continued working for two years until 1899. Léger decided to move to Paris in 1900 and supported himself as an architectural draftsman. He was refused entrance to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts but continued with his artistic studies and eventually gained entrance in 1903.

Léger’s early works were primarily influenced by the Impressionist Movement but after seeing the Paul Cézanne retrospective at the Salon d’Automne in 1907 and having contact with the early Cubism of Picasso and Braque, his personal development and style were significantly impacted. From 1911 to 1914, Léger’s work became increasingly abstract, and he started to limit his color to the primaries and black and white. In 1912, he was given his first solo show at Galerie Kahnweiler in Paris and signed a contract with Daniel Kahnweiler who had already discovered Picasso and Braque.

Léger served in the military from 1914 but was discharged after having been gassed in 1917. After the war he became good friends with the French artist Le Corbusier and his ‘mechanical’ period, in which figures and objects are characterized by tubular, machinelike forms, began.

During the 1920s he collaborated on films and designed sets and costumes for performances and in 1924, he completed his first film without a plot, Ballet mécanique. In 1931, he visited the United States for the first time. In 1935, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Art Institute of Chicago presented an exhibition of his work. During the outbreak of World War II, Léger lived in the United States from 1940 to 1945 where he taught at Yale University and at Mills College in California. After the war was over in 1945, Léger returned to France.

In the decade before his death, Léger’s work was in great demand. His wide-ranging projects included book illustrations, monumental figure paintings and murals, stained-glass windows, mosaics, polychrome ceramic sculptures, and set and costume designs. In 1955, he won the Grand Prize at the São Paulo Biennale. Léger died August 17 of that year, at his home in Gif-sur-Yvette, France. The Musée Fernand Léger was inaugurated in 1960 in Biot, France.

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