ART-USA: Fernand Leger’s American Sojourn Re-visited

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Apr 28 1998 (IPS) - When French painter Fernand Leger visited New York City in 1930, he wrote back to his friends that the city’s “overloaded spectacle” had driven him “mad with joy.” Now, a New York exhibition recaptures his experience in a survey of Leger’s machine-inspired and yet sensuous work.

The highlight of the Leger exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art, which lasts until May 12, is in fact the rare sight of the artist’s 1940-45 sojourn in Hoboken, New Jersey. It was there that he found in the United States the sort of passionate relationship between man and machine which he had explored for nearly 30 years.

“Perhaps the imagination is more creative and rapid here,” he wrote. Several series – such as ‘Les Plongeurs’ (The Divers), which feauture hulking construction workers amid the brightly- coloured rafters of tall buildings – attest to his fascination with his surroundings.

“For me, the contrast in the United States between the mechanical and the natural is one of great anti-melodic intensity,” Leger wrote in ‘The Museum of Modern Art Bulletin’ in 1946.

“But bad taste is also one of the raw materials,” he added, noting the wasting carcasses of broken machines littering the landscape and women dressed “more like acrobats in a circus than one would ever come across on a Paris street.”

In paintings like the 1945 work ‘La Grande Julie’ (Big Julie) or his series of paintings of construction workers and bicyclists at leisure in the U.S. countryside, Leger skillfully combined machines that revealed their sensuous side – broken bicycles wrapped around trees, steel girders sharply outlined against a deep-blue sky – with people at work and play.

The artist, inspired by modernism and such styles as Cubism, deliberately emphasised his human subjects’ fluidity and rotundity, always stressing – in support of his Socialist beliefs – the grandeur of common people living in a mechanical era.

The New York exhibition is equally adept at showing Leger’s earlier periods, when machines, with their pure lines, functional contours and interlocking functions, played the dominant role in his compositions.

In his 1920 painting ‘Le Mecanicien’ (The Mechanic), for example, Leger offers a portrait of a burly, mustachioed man who, because of the schematic contours of his muscles and the almost Art Deco-style sharpness of his face, resembles the tools that he uses.

Leger’s masterwork, ‘Le Grand Dejeuner’ (also called ‘Three Women’), is perhaps the supreme expression of the Parisian aesthetic of Purism, in which geometric principles emphasise the beauty of the human form. The three women of the painting are almost entirely composed of circles and sleek curves, while their apartment has been reduced to a series of brightly-coloured grids – and yet Leger suggests a vitality and humanity far more passionate than geometric patterns would normally be expected to show.

The sweep of the Museum of Modern Art exhibit shows how daring Leger’s work was. Far from being simply a Cubist painter, Leger experimented with all types of composition: the pyramid-style, almost monochromatic paintings of early Cubism; the sharp lines and daring colour sense of Soviet designers like Alexander Rodchenko; the heroic common people of Socialist Realism and the geometric abstractions of Purism.

The exhibit also shows other aspects of the French artist’s work. Leger also participated in architecture, murals, book design and even cinema.

Some highlights of the New York exhibit include, in fact, a wonderful bit of animation featuring a jazzy, mechanical caricature of Charlie Chaplin – a Leger favourite – which bounces and dances on its pump-like limbs; and a series of film stills in which Barbie-like dolls rip apart a male suitor to live free from marriage. Throughout, there is a prevailing puckish humour and love of humanity.

Leger successfully showed throughout his career, the role of the artist is to build “the collective art of tomorrow” and, as the current exhibition reveals, Leger himself was able to accomplish that task with a bold, passionate clarity.