Fernand Léger

‘It’s not my fault that I put bits of ads in my paintings. You go through a town in
Normandy and all of a sudden “Dubonnet” hits you in the eye.’

This shock effect prevailed in Fernand Léger’s work through his attachment to striking contrasts, angles and curves, flat and solid, cold and hot, which he used so dramatically throughout his career. And for him the billboards held their own in a landscape, along with trees, clouds and high-tension towers. He was at the mercy of the object; he was not romantic: ‘Objects attract me and not the rest.’

Léger credited Cézanne with a ‘restless sensitivity to plastic contrasts’, and said ‘he was the only one of the Impressionists to lay his finger on the deeper meaning of plastic life, because of his sensitivity to the contrast of forms’. Léger’s emphasis on relationships of forms and colours fired his belief that intensity of expression, even to distortion of the subject, was the essential ingredient in both representational and abstract pictures. By 1910 he had staked out his own claim: a pictorial realism that is ordered and balanced, with ‘three great plastic components; lines, forms, and colors’. He dismissed academic painting as decorative and simply illustrative of religious, mythological, or historical events. He praised the Impressionists for daring to sublimate subject to colour. ‘For the Impressionists a green apple on a red rug is no longer the relationship between two objects, but the relationship between two tones, a green and a red.’ Léger believed visual realism had been overtaken by conceptual realism, and his style, like Cézanne’s, was a transformation of colour into volume and line into structure.

Léger’s Cubist evolution was classical – he moved from Cézanne to the faceting of analytical Cubism, and then to the flat juxtaposition of forms and colours of synthetic Cubism. Around 1908 he and Robert Delauney first saw the monochrome Cubist paintings by Picasso and Braque at Daniel-Henri Kahnweller’s gallery.

Delaunay’s reaction was that they were painted with cobwebs; Léger felt that Picasso and Braque had certainly crossed a barrier, but that their work had little base of support.

From 1910 his strongly articulated forms in flat colour, outlined in black and animating the whole surface, were his own statement. The important contrast of forms series of 1913/14 with exuberant clusters of drum and wedge shapes in primary colours, established his style.

Sourced from: Extract from Exhibition catalogue, introductory essay