Fernand Léger (d'après)

Nothing predestined Fernand Léger, the son of a Norman beef farmer, to become a leading figure in the Parisian avant-garde. A poor student but a good draughtsman, he worked as an apprentice for an architect in Caen.

At the age of 19, he moved to Paris to study with painter Gérôme at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. In 1907, a decisive year for him, Léger moved to La Ruche in the artistic effervescence of Montparnasse, where he made friends with Robert Delaunay, Marc Chagall, Blaise Cendrars…

Introduced to cubism by Cézanne, he quickly forged his own style on the bangs of Braque and Picasso’s research. To transcribe the dynamism of his time, he developed a painting style based on contrasts of form and color, the cornerstone of his aesthetic that would never be called into question by subsequent developments.


His departure for war in August 1914 marked an abrupt break. At the front, Léger drew on makeshift supports, before being hospitalized and discharged in 1917.

After the war, the themes of the city and the machine became the focus of Léger’s attention. Inspired by modern life, Léger advocated a “new realism”, attuned to the plastic beauty of industrial civilization. Aware that painting was competing with the spectacle of the big city, he integrated urban signs and mechanical motifs into his compositions, while the human figure, desensitized and standardized, was reduced to geometry.

Fernand Léger gained international recognition in the 1930s, exhibiting in Europe and the United States, where he made several trips. From this time on, his pictorial research moved away from mechanistic aesthetics to become part of the great pictorial tradition.
At the start of the war, Léger fled France for New York, “the greatest show on earth”. This American period was particularly creative. With the Diver and Cyclist series, Léger invented the principle of color outside, by which he dissociated color and form.