Fernand Léger French, 1881-1955

Fernand Léger was born in Normandy in 1881. After an apprenticeship with an architect in Caen, he moved to Paris in 1900. He began earning a living as an architectural draftsman. Although denied admission to the École des Beaux-Arts, he nonetheless attended classes there starting in 1903. He also frequented the Académie Julian. Traces of Impressionism are still evident in his earliest known works, dating from 1905.

Two encounters transformed his artistic trajectory: the Cézanne retrospective at the 1907 Salon d'Automne and his exposure to the nascent Cubism of Picasso and Braque. Between 1911 and 1914, his work became increasingly abstract as he deliberately restricted his palette to primary colors, black, and white. In 1912, the Kahnweiler Gallery held his first solo exhibition.

During World War I, Léger was conscripted into the engineering corps. It was then that he came into daily contact with machinery; he was deeply influenced by these machines and their tubular forms. He himself described this experience as a pivotal moment for his art. Indeed, his "mechanical period" began in 1917: he rendered figures and objects using tubular, almost robotic forms that evoked an industrial world.

In the early 1920s, Léger collaborated with writer Blaise Cendrars on film projects and designed sets and costumes for Rolf de Maré’s Ballets Suédois. In 1924, he created Ballet Mécanique—a film with neither script nor plot that is considered a seminal work of avant-garde cinema—and opened a studio with the painter Amédée Ozenfant. In 1925, he exhibited his first murals at the Pavillon de l'Esprit Nouveau, designed by Le Corbusier for the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts.

He traveled to the United States for the first time in 1931; his first exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Art Institute of Chicago took place in 1935. He eventually settled in the United States to escape the Occupation, returning to France at the end of the war. That same year, he joined the French Communist Party; this political commitment is reflected in some of his later works, in which he placed the figure of the worker and collective leisure activities at the heart of his creative output.

The final decade of his life was remarkably prolific: he produced book illustrations, monumental paintings and frescoes, stained glass, mosaics, polychrome ceramic sculptures, and stage sets and costumes. In 1952, he married Nadia Khodossievitch—a former student who had become his long-time collaborator—as his second wife. In 1955, he received the Grand Prize at the São Paulo Biennial. He died on August 17 of that same year at his home in Gif-sur-Yvette.

The Fernand Léger National Museum opened in 1960 in Biot, in the Alpes-Maritimes region, definitively cementing the artist's place in 20th-century art.