Tous Léger! Fernand Léger and his contemporary echoes

The exhibition ‘Tous Léger’ (All Léger) opened recently in Paris at the Musée de Luxembourg, showing how the plastic innovations of one of the masters of the 20th-century avant-garde, Fernand Léger, inspired the very diverse work of artists such as Niki de Saint-Phalle, Yves Klein, and many others. Fernand Léger, one of the pioneers of Cubism, brought colour into a previously monochrome movement. Colour became a vital necessity for the artist in the 1930s, as this work demonstrates.

Fernand Léger's American exile during the Occupation brought his figurative and colourful art to the attention of a new generation of artists. In the post-war period, it had a real impact on American Pop Art, as well as on members of the French New Realism, a French response to the transatlantic movement. Artists such as Niki de Saint Phalle, César and Yves Klein would adopt the same dazzling colours, but also the figuration that characterises Léger's work.