Collection: Léger Fernand

(Argentan 1881 - Gif-sur-Yvette 1955)

Fernand Léger was one of the great painters of the twentieth century, who influenced entire generations of European and American artists, moving from an initial post-impressionist period to a cubist phase, while later developing a completely autonomous style, eventually maturing a sensitivity for Abstractionism and then for Futurism and Constructivism, working for example on the mechanical decomposition of bodies and things (the so-called "mechanical" period, in which figures and objects were characterized by tubular and geometric shapes).
He moved from Normandy to Paris in 1900, earning a living as an architectural draftsman, and where he attended classes at the École des Beaux-Arts despite being denied admission. The retrospective of Paul Cézanne at the Salon d’Automne in 1907 and contact with the early Cubism of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque significantly impacted the development of his style, which during these years gradually evolved towards abstraction, with a chromatic palette limited to the use of primary colors and black and white.
In 1931 he visited the United States for the first time and his works were exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Art Institute of Chicago. He lived overseas from 1940 to 1945 and returned to France after the war to dedicate the last ten years of his life to multiple projects: book illustrations, paintings and monumental murals, stained glass, mosaics, polychrome ceramic sculptures, and designs for stage sets and costumes.
Léger's graphic production is an integral part of this total vision of art. His lithographs, many of which were printed by Mourlot, bring to paper the same visual grammar of painting: simplified forms, flat and vibrant colors, stable figures. The catalog raisonné of the complete graphic work, edited by Lawrence Saphire and published in 1978, documents the richness and coherence of this parallel production.
In Biot, in the south of France, the Musée National Fernand Léger dedicated to him is active, opened two years after his death to pay tribute to him and promote the knowledge of his work.