Léger Fernand

Famous French artist who made a significant contribution to the art of the 20th century. From 1900 he lived in Paris, was professionally engaged in art, and was at the center of the artistic life of the European avant-garde (see: Avant-garde) at the beginning of the century. In terms of artistic and stylistic quests, he creatively experienced passions for cubism, futurism, naive art, and constructivism. As a result, he came to an individual style based on the use of individual techniques, elements and principles of artistic expression of these directions. At an early stage, he created semi-abstract pictorial compositions from volumetric elements, close to those that were painted by the Cubo-Futurists in Russia at the same time (see: Cubo-Futurism). He participated in the First World War, which gave impetus to his perception of man as some insignificant part of a huge social machine (a military machine, in this case). The technological progress that intensified in the post-war years, which was by no means perceived negatively, led him to an acute sense of the mechanization (or even the machine nature) of society. Following the futurists, he begins to be actively interested in structures, parts and elements of the world of technology: train wheels, rails, gears, various motors, pulleys, etc. However, unlike the futurists, his attention is attracted not by their dynamics - participation in some mechanical processes, but by their static form in isolation from their utilitarian functions. Movement and time are not of any interest to L. He creates extremely static, balanced compositions in which space and rhythm arise solely due to the structural organization of bright colored (often local colors) planes and generalized simplified forms of objects and human figures. The latter are completely equal in rights with other depicted objects and abstract forms. This is achieved by depicting the human figure in a distinctly constructive and machine-like manner. The faces are unified and primitivized to the extreme, devoid of any hint of psychologism or individuality; signs of life or animation. These are dolls, mannequins or robots made up of standard elements (like cellophane dolls of the mid-20th century, assembled for mobility from individual members, fastened with rubber bands, threads, wire): arms, legs, heads, hair, torsos, breasts, etc. At the same time, the boundaries of the connection of individual members are clearly defined. The figures are depicted frozen in certain poses with certain gestures, often as if floating in outer space - in many of L.'s paintings there is no clearly defined gravitational center. By some attributes (clothing, tools, gestures) one can understand that they all belong to broad layers of the people (workers, peasants, ordinary people). In L., however, they are completely removed from real social, everyday or industrial contexts and in the space of the picture they play the same role as inanimate objects, flowers, trees, abstract forms, floating spots of color outside the forms, local colored surfaces - a purely artistic one: they form abstract-sounding color-form compositions. Nevertheless, their conditional isomorphism (a simplified schematized robotic form of a person of a certain social affiliation) creates in L.’s paintings some kind of unreal (inherent only to them) atmosphere of an extremely aestheticized anthropo-technical static world of majestic calm and beauty. At the same time, the impression of peace is achieved through artistic harmonization of heightened expressive and visual oppositions and contrasts. The intense play with contrasts of color, shape, lines, neighboring objects, images of objects with their forms in visible reality, etc. in L.’s works reaches almost the limits of pictorial possibilities, which creates a special (sometimes almost mystical) aesthetic effect. Due to such an artistic context, trivial things of everyday life and figures of workers and peasants (not to mention the abstract forms that are organically included in all L.’s compositions) acquire special significance and expressive power. “The subject,” L. formulates his artistic credo, “should become the main character in modern painting and displace the theme. When personalities, figures, the human body are reduced to an object, the modern artist is given an inordinate amount of freedom. The opportunity opens up before him to apply the law of opposites, that is, the constructive law in its entirety. But if the human body appears in painting as a sentimental or expressive value, then in figurative compositions (paintings) no development is possible. In the mind of a modern artist, clouds, cars, trees have equal importance with figures [of people]. Thus, new paintings and large compositions can arise on the basis of completely different premises [than before].” The equalization of objects of the natural world, products of human activity and the figures of people themselves on the basis of their exclusively color-shape sound opened up the art of the 20th century. unusually broad creative perspectives, which have since been fully mastered by a wide variety of artistic practices and creative individuals. In fact, the best works of L. appear as original “icons” of the 19th-20th centuries. (more precisely, the stage of technical progress in the pre-electronic period), because in them, with the utmost strength possible for painting, the very spirit of machine-mechanical civilization was aestheticized, its romanticization was carried out. L. himself also gave concrete impulses to the widespread implementation of his principles not only in painting. He made costumes and scenery for the theater, created monumental decorative panels in various techniques (including ceramics), stained glass windows, and shot the first film without a script, “Mechanical Ballet” (1924). However, like Chagall or Picasso, he did not create either a school or a movement in art. He had no direct followers, except for his wife N. Leger.