The paintings of Fernand Leger (1881 – 1955) often celebrate machine-made objects and modern city life. However, in the late 1920s, he began to include natural forms in his work. The curving line down the left-hand side of his 1927 painting Leaves and Shell softens the underlying geometric structure of horizontal and vertical lines. It also acts as a link to the organic shapes of leaves and a shell. These naturalistic elements, with their streamlined shapes, are closely connected to the abstract parts of the image.
In this monumental canvas that Fernand Leger worked on from 1921–22, three seemingly self-possessed women, flanked by a black cat, lounge in an interior decorated with modern furnishings. Their bodies – modeled so that they seem to reflect the light – appear as metallic as the stylized furniture that surrounds them. Leger orchestrated the interlocking components of this busy composition as if it were a machine, imparting an industrial sensibility into the domestic sphere.
Photographed in The Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
The quintessential painter of the machine age, Fernand Leger observed the effects of modern technology in the trenches as a soldier in the French army during World War I. Featuring workers whose bodies appear to be assembled from standardized industrial parts, The Builders (1920) exemplifies the style he developed after the war. Unlike the toiling laborers of Thomas Hart Benton’s mural, America Today, the builders here fuse seamlessly with the scaffolding and gears around them, as though they are part of one, harmonious machine. In the 1930s and 1940s. Leger would go on to make his own murals, featuring abstracted images of industry and machine power.
Photographed in The Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC.
Fernand Leger arranged impersonal elements of a new machine age like a cheerful assembly of children’s building blocks in Mechanical Elements (1920). Initially, his infatuation with modern technology did not go over well with collectors. As the artist later recalled, “For two years, Leonce Rosenberg, my dealer at the time, could not sell any of the work from my ‘mechanical period,’ while the mandolins of the Cubists moved briskly.”
Photographed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC.
Woman with a Cat (1921) belongs to group of monumental female figures that Fernand Léger (1881 – 1955) painted throughout the 1920s. Motionless and frontal, this nude might be made of stone or metal, evoking at once a classical sculpture and a futurist robot. While Léger’s subject is rooted in European, particular French, artistic traditions, his streamlined style reflects contemporary design aesthetics that the painter’s friend, the architect Le Corbusier, advocated and popularized.
Photographed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC.
