“Abstract art came as a complete revelation, and then we were able to consider the human figure as a plastic value, not as a sentimental value. That is why the human figure has remained willfully inexpressive throughout the evolution of my work” ~Fernand Léger, “How I Conceive the Human Figure” (1949).

Left: Fernand Léger, Esquisse pour “La Ville”, 1er état (Sketch for La Ville, 1st state), 1919,  Oil on canvas, 25 ½ x 21 ¼”.  Coll: Toledo Museum of Art. LEG-205

The current exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Léger: Modern Art and the Metropolis, casts new light on the life and career of French modernist painter, Fernand Léger (1881-1955). The centerpiece of the exhibit is the mural-sized piece, The City (1919), monumental both for its size, and for its referential power to the complexity of the early 20th century urban environment and its inhabitants. The manufactured features of the city are multilayered and imposing, dislocating the individual in the maze of sign posts, steel and concrete edifices and anonymous Cubist-style shapes. In it, he captures the visual language of a new world, serving as a modern manifesto in which conflicting interests and needs uneasily coalesce. artes fine arts magazine

This important painting, in the PMA collection—placed as it is in dialogue with the urban art and culture of modernity—serves as a starting point for a brilliant curatorial effort on the part of Anna Vallye, who has managed to assemble work in various mediums—painting, film and stage craft—that trace the many interests of Léger, as he explore the changing Parisian art scene at the height of the avant-garde period. This interdisciplinary exhibition sheds new light on the vitally experimental decade of the 1920s, when Léger, working in conjunction with other modernist luminaries played a leading role in redefining the practice of painting, by bringing it into active engagement with the urban environment and modern mass media.

The exhibition will present a core group of Léger’s exceptional paintings on the theme of the city, along with film projections, theater designs, architectural models, and print and advertising designs by the artist and his contemporaries. In a multi-media installation of more than 120 works, including loans from American and European public and private collections, this exhibition will demonstrate the varied strategies through which artists and designers of the European avant-garde, with Léger in the lead, sought to participate in the complexity and excitement of the metropolis. The exhibition will also feature work by Cassandre, Robert and Sonia Delaunay, Theo van Doesburg, Alexandra Exter, Abel Gance, Le Corbusier, Piet Mondrian, Gerald Murphy, Francis Picabia, Man Ray, and many others.

A native of Normandy, Léger was originally trained as an architect and worked as an architectural draftsman. After several unsuccessful attempts as an art student, he began to work seriously as a painter only at the age of 25. At this point his work showed the influence of impressionism, as seen in a handful of paintings from this period that he did not later destroy. A new emphasis on drawing and geometry appeared in Léger’s work after he saw the Cézanne retrospective at the Salon d’Automne in 1907.

In 1909 he moved to Montparnasse and met such leaders of the avant-garde as Archipenko, Lipchitz, Chagall, Joseph Csaky and Robert Delaunay. His major painting of this period reveal his attraction to a personal form of Cubism that his critics termed “Tubism” for its emphasis on cylindrical forms. In 1911, the hanging committee of the Salon des Indépendants hung Léger together with the other painters that would soon be identified as Cubists: Metzinger, Gleizes, Le Fauconnier, and Delaunay. Picasso and Braque had declined to exhibit in this show, rejecting the term ‘cubism’ to refer to their experimental work with form and perspective. Thus, history would consign these other artists, exhibiting as an organized group, to reveal Cubism to the general public for the first time.

The following year he again exhibited at the Salon d’Automne and Indépendants with the Cubists, and joined with several artists, including Henri Le Fauconnier, Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, Francis Picabia and the Duchamp brothers, Jacques Villon, Raymond Duchamp-Villon and Marcel Duchamp to form the Puteaux Group—also called the Section d’Or (The Golden Section, or Orphists). Léger’s paintings, from then until 1914, became increasingly abstract. Their tubular, conical, and cubed forms are laconically rendered in rough patches of primary colors plus green, black and white, as seen in the series of paintings with the title Contrasting Forms. The artist also made little use of the collage technique pioneered by Braque and Picasso.

Léger’s experiences in World War I had a significant effect on his work. Mobilized in August 1914 for service in the French Army, he spent two years at the front in Argonne.[5] He produced many sketches of artillery pieces, airplanes, and fellow soldiers while in the trenches. In September 1916 he almost died after a mustard gas attack by the German troops at Verdun. During a period of convalescence in Villepinte he painted The Card Players (1917), a canvas whose robot-like, monstrous figures reflect the ambivalence of his experience of war. As he explained:

“…I was stunned by the sight of the breech of a 75 millimeter in the sunlight. It was the magic of light on the white metal. That’s all it took for me to forget the abstract art of 1912–1913. The crudeness, variety, humor, and downright perfection of certain men around me, their precise sense of utilitarian reality and its application in the midst of the life-and-death drama we were in … made me want to paint in slang with all its color and mobility.

Starting in 1918, he produced the first paintings in the Disk series, in which disks suggestive of traffic lights figure prominently. The City (1919) marks the beginning of his “mechanical period”, during which the figures and objects he painted were characterized by sleekly rendered tubular and machine-like forms. In his paysages animés (animated landscapes) of 1921, figures and animals exist harmoniously in landscapes made up of streamlined forms. The frontal compositions, firm contours, and smoothly blended colors of these paintings frequently recall the works of Henri Rousseau an artist Léger greatly admired and whom he had met in 1909.

This transition paralleled, in the context of his visual vocabulary, the transformation from Analytical to Synthetic Cubism. With previous paintings maintaining a traditional illusion of solids behind an imaginary picture plane, The City reveals a far greater awareness of the opaque reality of the picture surface. Forms are flattened and seem to exist in front of the picture plane. Figures and forms lack sculptural roundness, appearing as self-contained fragments, rather than complete objects partially hidden from view. In this way, Léger’s paintings from this period begin to represent both the complexity and unity of the urban experience, while at the same time, capturing the abrupt and vivid sensations of city life, only fractionally observed. In it he has synthesized identifiable facts of the city’s appearance—billboards, apartment buildings, scaffolding, billowing smoke, and a telephone pole—with irregular abstract shapes in vivid hues. The clash, overlap, and rapid jumps among the shapes and colors borrow from the cinematic techniques of quickly cutting between scenes, and the inclusiveness of the composition resembles the panoramic sweep of a movie camera. This is not so much a particular city represented as the essence of the urban center as a site of overwhelming simultaneous impressions.

As an enthusiast of the modern, Léger was greatly attracted to cinema, and for a time he considered giving up painting for filmmaking. In 1923–24 he designed the set for the laboratory scene in Marcel L’Herbier’s L’Inhumaine(The Inhuman One). In 1924, in collaboration with Dudley Murphy, George Antheil, and Man Ray, Léger produced and directed the iconic and Futurism-influenced film, Ballet Mécanique (Mechanical Ballet). Neither abstract nor narrative, it is a series of images of a woman’s lips and teeth, close-up shots of ordinary objects, and repeated images of human activities and machines in rhythmic movement. Léger saw in the cinema the animated equivalent of “the new spirit of modern art and poetry.”

The exhibit transitions seamlessly into several examples of works by Léger, created with the film genre in mind, or in collaboration with film makers. Memories of his war experience and extended recovery from gas poisoning were foremost in his mind, when Léger first returned to Paris in 1916. “We were of the opinion that everything was happening ‘over there,’ that life was collected on the [front] lines, that the civilian zone was only boredom and death.” The artist was first introduced to the cinema by his friend, critic and poet, Guillaume Apollinaire, who encouraged him to look at life at home differently. He implored Léger, “There is something [at the cinema] all the same, come see.” This opened creative doors for him, influenced, ironically enough, by the comic styling of Charlie Chaplin (Charlot, as he was known in France). For Léger, Charlot embodied “not only the impact of modern film comedy, but also the modernist principles of surprise and spectacular display,” according to exhibition catalogue contributor, Jennifer Wild.

With the novelty of film, and its ability to deliver poignant images of war, as well as comic-tragic drama to an assembled audience, Léger work with French film makers like Abel Gance and Dudley Murphy explored allegorical relationships of a mechanistic society, animated on film, then elevated to forms and motifs captured on canvas. His Composition with Hat and Hands (1927), is directly referential to a series of studies on film of details of everyday object, ranging from the human figure, to geometric shapes, hats, bottles and spinning wheels. For Léger, the nexus between film and painting was deemed as essential to understanding the origin of the modern spectacle, especially as embraced by Charlot, and his “element of the surprise effect. ’” Chaplin did not merely appearing on the screen, but “erupted as a ‘living object’ with mechanical movements, and machine-like gags” that personified what was unique about the film medium (when compared to theater), but personified Léger’s view of the human figure in his work possessing “plastic value, devoid of sentimentality.”

In 1920, he met architect and artist, Le Corbusier, who would remain a lifelong friend and provide Léger with inspiration for some of his architectural projects in later years. They shared an interest in the Purism movement—founded by Le Corbusier and Amédée Ozenfant—a style intended as a rational, mathematically based corrective to the impulsiveness of cubism. His still life compositions from this period are dominated by stable, interlocking rectangular formations in vertical and horizontal orientation, informed by his interest in the ‘new’ architectural design. Shapes integrate into a machine-like, functioning whole, a play of masses and interpenetrating spaces brought together in light. Le Corbusier said that Léger’s paintings demand a new architecture—one in which design supports art and art supports design in a series of spatially-layered, interlocking forms.

Modernist architects of the 1920s would refute the ornamentation in building structures, and avant-garde artists like Léger were attracted to certain aspects of the modernist styling. The “mechanical” works Léger painted in the 1920s, in their formal clarity as well as in their subject matter—both in terms of figurative paintings, as well as well-ordered landscapes are typical of the postwar “return to order” in the arts, and link him to the tradition of French figurative painting represented by Poussin and Corot. As Christopher Green suggests, as noted in an article in the Léger catalogue, by Spyros Papapetros, “Léger’s paintings, post-1917, would acquire a ‘marked decorative quality,’ with the addition of certain motifs, such as ‘ boarders with frills and patterns of dots or dashes, and in fact, the artist was drawn to the idea of painting as embellishment of architecture—as decoration.’” Papapetros says that “In those years Léger’s painting became increasingly architectural, transforming…into a form of architecture itself. In his easel paintings that Léger proposes an alternative use of architecture as decoration, which now acquires a structural role.”

According to exhibition curator, Anna Vallye, “No other work in Léger’s career upends the categorical distinction often drawn between ‘modernisn’ and the ‘avant-garde.’ In this light Leger can only appear as an artist of radical impurity. And no other work in Léger’s career puts this [assimilation] forth more forcefully as his 1919 painting, The City, the catalyst and point of departure for this show.”

The staccato rhythm of Léger’s The City produces the sensation of living in or moving through a machine-age urban environment. Visual and aural stimuli condense into a kaleidoscope of shallow, overlapping planes, signs, and fragments. The abbreviated city sights, mechanical elements, and abstract forms deliberately lack natural continuity or sequential coherence. The monumental scale of the canvas envelops the viewer like a theater backdrop, inviting us to join the mechanized figures climbing the staircase in the foreground in order to enter this bustling modern metropolis. The fragmented cityscape is illuminated by the intensity of Léger’s palette—vivid hues suggesting the dazzle of modern advertising and the glare of street lighting.

The taut, geometric composition is built up with distinct areas of flat, unmodulated colors that produce depth and movement without resorting to the traditional chiaroscuro method of modeling light and shade. The scaffolding, buildings, steel structures, bridges, billboards, shop window mannequins in silhouette, rounded plumes of smoke, and telephone pole are rendered in primary reds, yellows, and blues contrasting with vibrant greens, purples, and grays. Passages of black and white separate the blocks of pure tones into individual compartments, with contrasts and ruptures evoking the density of the city. The pungent blacks provide graphic clarity, while the extensive use of white provides an optical light that appears to burn from within the picture. The artist has included his own initials, “F L,” among the chaotic jumble of stenciled letters, recalling the colorful posters of the Place de Clichy, where Parisians are bombarded by a deluge of advertising billboards and commercial signs.

The PMA exhibit provides a comprehensive look at the range of interests and contributions made by the artists in the fields of advertising and printed matter (“publicity”), performance and popular entertainment (“spectacle”), and architecture (“space”). Their three-phased thematic organization includes shared influences by other notable 20th century artists, like Delauney, Mondrian, van Doesburg, Archipenko, and Le Corbusier, the painter, to name a few. For curator, Vallye, the exhibition offers an examination of “Léger’s activities across the arts and through the eyes of the 1920s avant-gardes who accepted the painting as one of their own while they fluently traversed boundaries between the arts, between high art and mass culture, and between art and life. Léger: Modern Art and the Metropolis takes its ultimate shape as a constellation of mutually formative encounters between Léger and the poets, architects, filmmakers, and designers who congregated in Paris in the fertile unfolding of the early postwar moment…This unsettling traffic shaped the experience of the modern metropolis in the 1920s…The City was a creation of the metropolis, and something of the painting’s enduring spirit belongs to the world that produced it.”

By Richard Friswell, Managing Editor

Léger: Modern Art and the Metropolis is on display at the Philadelphia Museum of Art though January 5, 2014. Go to: http://www.philamuseum.org/

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