LEGER, FERNAND

born Feb. 4, 1881, Argentan, France died Aug. 17, 1955, Gif-sur-Yvette French painter, deeply influenced by modern industrial technology, who developed machine art, or a style characterized by monumental mechanistic forms in bold colours arranged in highly disciplined compositions. Lger was born into a peasant family in a small town in Normandy. He served a two-year apprenticeship in an architect's office at Caen and then, in 1900, went to work in Paris, first as an architectural draftsman and later as a retoucher of photographs. In 1903 he enrolled in the Paris cole des Arts Dcoratifs and, although failing to get into the cole des Beaux-Arts, began to study under two of its professors as an unofficial pupil. A large retrospective of the work of Paul Czanne at the Paris Salon d'Automne of 1907 influenced him profoundly. In 1908, the year Cubism began, Lger rented a studio at La Ruche (The Beehive), an artists' settlement on the edge of Montparnasse, and there he soon found himself in the centre of several avant-garde tendencies. Eventually, he got to know the painters Robert Delaunay, Marc Chagall, and Chaim Soutine; the sculptors Jacques Lipchitz, Henri Laurens, and Alexander Archipenko; and the poets Guillaume Apollinaire, Max Jacob, Blaise Cendrars, and Pierre Reverdy. Through the poets, in particular, there was a connection with the Cubist movement, the early centre of which was in Montmartre, where Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque had their studios. Lger had been painting in a style that mixed Impressionism with Fauvism; now, under the pressure of his new environment, he evolved rapidly. In 1909 he produced La Couseuse (The Seamstress), in which he reduced his colours to a combination of blue-gray and buff and the human body to a construction of slabs and cylinders that resembled a robot. That same year he began Nus dans la fort (Nudes in the Forest), completed the following year, in which the geometric volumes composing the figures are broken into large fragments. By 1913 Lger was painting, in brighter colours, the series of dynamic, sometimes completely abstract studies he called Contrast of Forms; here his style, aptly nicknamed tubism, was intended to illustrate his theory that the way to achieve a maximum of pictorial effect was to multiply contrasts of colour, contrasts of curved and straight lines, and contrasts of solids with each other or with flat planes. In 1914, in a lecture entitled Les Rvlations picturales actuelles (Contemporary Achievements in Painting), he added to this aesthetic basis of his art an affirmation of his faith in modern life and popular culture: The breaks with the past that have occurred in our visual world are innumerable. . . . The advertisement hoarding, which brutally cuts across a landscape in obedience to the dictates of modern commerce, is one of the things that have aroused most fury among men of so-called good taste. And yet that yellow or red bill-board, shouting in a timid landscape, is the finest of possible reasons for the new painting; it knocks head over heels the whole sentimental and literary conception of art. . . . During World War I, in which he fought as a sapper in the front lines, Lger acquired a strengthened sense of reality and a renewed interest in cylindrical shapes, as found in weaponry. Without transition, he remembered, I found myself at the level of the entire French people. . . . At the same time I was dazzled by the breech of a 75 [artillery piece] in full sunlight, by the magic of the light on the bare metal. . . . Total revolution, as man and as painter. Gassed at the Battle of Verdun, he was hospitalized for a long period and was finally released from the army in 1917. That year he completed La Partie de Cartes (The Card Party), which he regarded as the first picture in which I deliberately took my subject from our own epoch. By 1919 he was in what has been called his mechanical period, which was marked by a fascination for motors, gears, bearings, furnaces, railway crossings, and factory interiors. In the mid-1920s, Lger was associated with the French formalist movement called Purism, which had been launched by the painter Amde Ozenfant and the painter-architect Charles-douard Jeanneret (Le Corbusier). But from then on, Lger's art was essentially figurative, and the only significant change in his style was a tendency, begun during World War II, to separate his bands of colour from his drawing and to leave them abstract. Lger took an interest in many arts besides painting. He designed sets for ballets and motion pictures, and in 1926 he conceived, directed, and produced Le Ballet mcanique (The Mechanical Ballet), a purely non-narrative film with photography by Man Ray and Dudley Murphy and music by the American composer George Antheil. Lger was concerned all his life about the relationship of colour to public buildings, and he was able to realize some of his ideas in the mosaic facade of Notre-Dame de Toute-Grce at Plateau d'Assy, in southeastern France (1949); in a mosaic for the crypt of the American memorial at Bastogne (1950); in a mural for the United Nations building in New York City; and in several projects for stained-glass windows, such as those for Sacr-Coeur of Audincourt, France (1951). His desire to bring his art closer to the life of ordinary people may have been one of his reasons for deciding, in 1945, to join the French Communist Partyalthough in fact he never practiced the Social Realism that was then favoured by Communist leaders. During the last years of his life, Lger's major paintings were Les Constructeurs (1950) and La Grande Parade (1954). A large number of studies and variations can be linked to both pictures. Few 20th-century artists accepted the Industrial Revolution with as much enthusiasm as Lger displayed during his long and, although qualitatively uneven, remarkably consistent career. Since his death his reputation, although somewhat that of a period figure, has grown. At Biot, in southern France, there is a museum devoted to his work. Roy Donald McMullen The Editors of the Encyclopdia Britannica Additional reading Excellent biographical and critical studies include Robert Delevoy, Lger (1962); Jean Cassou and Jean Leymarie, Fernand Lger: Drawings and Gouaches (1973); Christopher Green, Leger and the Avant-Garde (1976); Werner Schmalenbach, Fernand Lger (1976); Fernand Leger (1982), with essays by Robert T. Buck, Edward F. Fry, and Charlotta Kotik and an extensive bibliography; and Peter De Francia, Fernand Lger (1983).