French artist, Fernand Léger, pictured at work in his studio around 1949.
Fernand Léger is widely acknowledged to be one of the most influential artistic figures of the 20th century. Exploring numerous different mediums and styles throughout his career, Léger is most famous for his association with Cubism and his unique depictions of modern life and machinery, and his work has continued to inspire generations of artists since his death in 1955.
Though Léger is primarily thought of as a painter, he also experimented in sculpture, printmaking, ceramics, filmmaking, and staging theatre and dance sets. It is prints which dominate his market, accounting for 55% of the artist’s work sold at auction, where they usually reach prices between £100 and £500, though a large proportion fetch up to £5,000.
Léger’s art changed throughout the course of his life in response to the various experiences he underwent. It is therefore interesting to know some things about the artist when considering his art; below is a list of five things you might not have known about Fernand Léger.
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He Trained As An Architect
Fernand Léger was born in Normandy in 1881 to a family of cattle breeders. Though he displayed an aptitude for drawing, he was not encouraged to pursue an artistic career, and he was apprenticed to an architect instead. When he was 19, however, Léger moved to Paris and began studying art whilst supporting himself as an architectural draughtsman. Little survives of Léger’s earliest work, and it was only with the development and spread of Cubism that the artist really began to gain a reputation for himself.
His Most Expensive Print Sold For Over £20,000
Le Vase is a 1927 lithograph in colours which is consistently sought-after at auction, with one impression setting a new record for Léger prints when it was sold by Swann Galleries in September 2017 for £20,767.
The print’s popularity can partly be attributed to the unique variations within each impression: apparently, Léger intended to use only primary colours to produce the lithograph, as he was planning on creating the green and brown tones by overlaying these primary colours during the printing process. Whilst this proved too complicated to create the brown shade, it did work to make the green, and this has resulted in every impression of Le Vase featuring a slightly different tone of green.
Le Vase Sold by Swan Galleries in 2017
World War I Changed His Art Forever
The outbreak of the First World War interrupted Léger’s budding artistic career, and he was mobilised in August 1914 as part of the engineering corps. He continued to draw when he could, focusing especially on images of machinery, airplanes, weapons, and his fellow soldiers.
The war had a profound effect on Léger’s attitude towards life, art, and what he called “the crudeness, variety, humour, and downright perfection of certain men around me”. In 1916, he nearly died after a Mustard gas attack at Verdun, and he was hospitalised and subsequently discharged.
The images Léger had been surrounded by during the war would reappear in his so-called ‘mechanical period’ of 1918-1923, during which his paintings showed an obsession with machine-like forms. And after surviving long years of trench warfare and industrialised killing, it’s no surprise Léger’s work also began to take on a freer, more vibrant aspect. This remained the case throughout his life, as can be seen in his later prints such as Les Danseuses (Fond Jaune) and Cirque. As the artist once said: “The war made me what I am. I’m not afraid to say so.”
He Loved Colour
One of the most notable changes in Léger’s post-war work was the artist’s use of colour; he once said that living “in the midst of the life-and-death drama” of the war “made me want to paint in slang with all its colour and mobility.” Colour would play an increasingly-important part in his career, and he placed particular emphasis on contrast and primary colours, as is clear in prints such as Les Femmes au Perroquet and Les Danseuses (Fond Jaune).
In Léger’s own words, “Colour is a vital necessity. It is a raw material indispensable to life, like water and fire”.
La partie de campagne by Fernand Leger
He Was Fascinated By The Circus
Léger once wrote of the circus: “When I am lost in this astonishing metallic planet with its dazzling spotlights and the tiny acrobat who risks his life every night, I am distracted.” He was enthralled by the performative elements of the circus, and by the way it could bring entertainment and art to the general public.
The artist’s fascination with the circus led him to create a number of works inspired by it. The most famous of these are probably the prints published in his artist’s book of 1950, Cirque, which remain hugely popular at auction to this day. For Léger, the circus was inherently tied to the human urge “to break through restraints, to spread out, to grow toward freedom… To escape from the ground, to leave it.”
