Fernand Léger

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This exhibi­tion, prepared in close coope­ra­tion with the Kunst­mu­seum in Basel, does not survey the whole career of Fernand Léger (1881–1955) but concen­trates on his early works. This is the first exhibi­tion exclu­si­vely devoted to Léger’s cubist, machine and classical paintings of the period 1911–1924.

Léger is one of the great artists of Modernism. His works achieve a synthesis of life, art, and society. Their forms express an entirely new artistic science: that of whole-hearted identi­fi­ca­tion with the rhythm of modern life, and with everyday humanity. The years 1911 through 1924 represent a high point of Léger’s artistic career. The first section of the exhibi­tion traces the evolu­tio­nary process that culmi­nated in Léger’s Contrast of Forms, works in which he contrasts solid objects, blocks, tubes, spheres with each other. The experi­ence of being a soldier in World War I led Léger to abandon this kind of abstrac­tion. Modern warfare waged macha­ni­cally, with human beings en masse, utterly trans­formed his world-view. Contact with machines (railroads, automo­biles, movie cameras, machine guns) caused percep­tion itself to be mecha­nized. One of the earliest examples of Léger’s machine period (1917–24) is the Card Players, from the Rijks­mu­seum Kröller-Müller, Otterlo. In this master­piece, hitherto rarely seen outside the museum, human beings themselves look like robots. Léger’s paintings of the immediate postwar period are full of forms reminis­cent of steam­ships, cranes, railroad viaducts, bridges, propel­lers, engines, cylinders, ball bearing and cogwheels.

The clear forms and glowing colours of the painting The Disks are elements of a machine in motion. Léger does not illus­trate an engine but invents it, using purely pictoral means. Another dynamic interplay of contras­ting forms and colours is The Mecha­nical Elements, one of his finest works, now in the Öffent­liche Kunst­samm­lung Basel.

For Léger, a painting was a beautiful object that had function autono­mously. This parti­cu­larly applies to the classical figures in Breakfast and to the later “Human Machines”. Léger made no distinc­tion between painting a person and painting a machine: to him, both were archi­tec­tural constructs of colour and form.

In the works of his machine period, Léger used filmic techni­ques such as wide-angle shots, close-ups, jump cuts, and staccato rhythms. He was so fasci­nated by the motion-picture medium that he worked on a number of produc­tions himself and in 1924 made a short film of his own, Le Ballet mécanique. A rhythmic visual sequence of objects, figures, fragmens of figures, and machine parts, this film will be an integral part of the exhibi­tion at the Kunst­mu­seum Wolfsburg – as well as Léger’s set designs for the Swedish Ballet in Paris.

The exhibi­tion Fernand Léger 1911–1924 Le rhythme de la vie moderne contains some seventy paintings, and a dozen gouaches. A central work is the painting The Cit, from the Philadel­phia Museum of Art, which has not been in Europe since 1956. Prestel-Verlag was publi­shing a catalogue with essays by an inter­na­tional group of contributors.