THE MUSÉE NATIONAL Fernand Léger (musee-fernandleger.fr), in Biot, on the Côte d’Azur, is an excellent museum I recommend highly. There aren’t a great number of works by Léger in Paris, but there are some to be found, notably at the Centre Pompidou (centrepompidou.fr), which holds a number of Léger works in its permanent collection. Not surprisingly, as Léger lived in exile in New York from 1940 to 1945, the Museum of Modern Art (moma.org) has some of Léger’s most significant paintings. Readers wanting to delve further into the works of Léger may be interested in Fernand Léger (Museum of Modern Art, 2002) by Carolyn Lanchner, a former curator of painting and sculpture at MoMA, whose text accompanies each of the book’s thirty-five color plates, and Fernand Léger: Paris–New York (Hatje Cantz, 2008) by Yve-Alain Bois and other contributors, which focuses on Léger’s influence on major American artists, includ-ing Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella, and Andy Warhol.
JOHN RUSSELL was art critic for the Sunday Times of London and chief art critic for the New York Times from 1982 to 1990. He was also the author of Paris (Harry N. Abrams, 1983, 1994), Reading Russell: Essays 1941–1988 on Ideas, Literature, Art, Theater, Music, Places, and Persons (Harry N. Abrams, 1989), a number of monographs on artists such as Georges Seurat, Francis Bacon, Henry Moore, and Max Ernst, as well as The Meanings of Modern Art (Icon, 1991, revised edition), among others. Russell was renowned for avoiding the scathing form of art criticism and preferred to simply share his enthusiasm with his readers. As he wrote in Reading Russell, “It has never seemed to me much of an ambition to go through life snarling and spewing.” His obituary in the New York Times in 2008 noted that art, for Russell, “remained a glorious love affair and a lifelong adventure. ‘When art is made new, we are made new with it,’ he wrote in the first volume of The Meanings of Modern Art. ‘We have a sense of solidarity with our own time, and of psychic energies shared and redoubled, which is just about the most satisfying thing that life has to offer.’ ”
EVERY SO OFTEN there surfaces in art an image that is so compelling, so absolutely true to one particular moment in history, that it puts the historians out of business. One such image is evoked by The Mechanic, Fernand Léger’s painting of 1920 that fixes once and for all the idea that the life of the industrialized masses need not be without dignity, nor the individual mass- man turned into a disinherited cipher.
Léger believed this, with all his heart. If he makes us believe it, too, it is because he was not only a master of plain statement but a man to whom doubt and compromise and equivocation were abhorrent. He believed that the conveyor belt and the assembly line had changed life for the better, and that the industrialized working man would have his full share of the benefits of his hard work. It was a matter of faith with him that the mechanic was the New Man, the man for whom the machine was not a tyrant but the instrument of social liberation.
This could have led to a sententious, Stalin-type imagery of the Heroic Worker. But Léger’s mechanic is not at all like that, despite his bulging muscles. He is a man with a mind of his own. No faceless abstraction, he is distinctively a Frenchman of the 1920s, with his nautical tattoo, his sleeked-down hair and heavy mustache, his cigarette at the ready and rings on his well-fleshed finger. But there is also something very grand and quite timeless about him. Léger in 1919 had been in and out of the newly reopened Egyptian and Assyrian rooms in the Louvre, and he gave his mechanic a look of ancient art in the severe frontal pose of the torso and the right-angled turn of the head on the neck. The mechanic meets us both head-on and in profile, as he might in an Assyrian relief.
Behind him, in terms of geometric flat planes and brilliant color, is the ideal place of work: the factory that never was. Looking at the casquelike cut of his forehead and cheekbones, we see immediately that this man is at one with his machines and could wish for no greater fulfillment than to be in charge of them.
Léger himself was not of industrial origins, and he never in his life worked in a factory. The son of a cattle breeder, he was born in 1881 and grew up on his father’s farm in Normandy. His father was a giant of a man, and quick to come to blows when crossed. If he had not died suddenly while Fernand was still in school, there would never have been any question of his son being allowed to stray from the family business. Léger got started in Paris as an art student in 1903 and made a meager living as an architect’s draftsman, to begin with, and as a retoucher for a portrait photographer. He impressed his friends in Paris by the inherited solidity of his build; with his abundant red hair, his countrified freckles, and his general air of rude health and good spirits, he was very much the farmer’s son.
His was an accepting nature. He took change for granted, and welcomed it. That a new world should produce a new kind of art seemed to him not merely natural but axiomatic. Old-style aesthetes might wince to see red and yellow billboards set up among the halftones of the French countryside; Léger thought it was the best thing that could happen. New sights, new idioms, and new responses were what he lived by. “Modern man,” he said in 1914, “has to take in a hundred times as many impressions as came his way in the eighteenth century. Is it surprising that our language is full of diminutives and abbreviations? If modern paintings are highly condensed, and if the forms with them are taken apart and redistributed, it’s for the same reason.”
Léger by that time was a friend of poets like Apollinaire and Cendrars, and a friend and prized colleague of painters like Robert Delaunay and Le Douanier Rousseau. Like Picasso, Braque, Derain, Vlaminck, and Juan Gris, he showed his work in Paris at D. H. Kahnweiler’s little gallery near the Madeleine. He stood apart from the others, even so, in that when he tried his hand at a major work—the Nudes in the Forest of 1909–10—he instinctively chose a subject that involved people at work: naked woodsmen hacking away at tree trunks. It was a difficult, gloomy, almost monochromatic painting: the result of a long struggle, a “battle of volumes” as he said himself, to build the third dimension on flat canvas. “I wasn’t ready for color,” he said later.
Yet color was fundamental to modern life. The dynamic of that life, said Léger, was on the side of the poster in the street and the advertisement that lit up at night. “Post No Bills” was a ridiculous formula, well worthy of the society that sponsored it. “It’s the taste of the middle class that’s against posters,” he went on. “The peasant is made of stronger stuff. Look how he likes a strong contrast of color in his clothes! A man like that isn’t going to be scared by a billboard in a meadow.”
Machinery had new color, too. Léger never forgot how he went to a pioneer aviation show in Paris with Marcel Duchamp and Brancusi. As they walked among the prehistoric aircraft, with their exposed machinery and huge wooden propellers, Duchamp grew more and more silent. Suddenly he said: “Painting’s finished. How can we possibly compete with those propellers?” “I preferred the motors, myself,” Léger would say as he told the story, “but then I always preferred metal to wood.”
Léger had his fill of metal when he was drafted into the French army in 1914. Both as an artilleryman, from 1914 to 1916, and later as a stretcher bearer on the Verdun front, he saw as much as anyone of the horrors of war. But he never discussed them. What moved him was the human quality of his fellow soldiers and the immediate, unaffected beauty of the guns that he had to fire. He had been on the very edge, in 1912 and 1913, of a purely abstract art: an art based on contrasted forms that had no reference to the visible world. No sooner was he in the army than activity of that kind began to seem to him both petty and futile.
“There I was,” he said later, “on an equal footing with the totality of the French people. My new comrades were miners, laborers, metalworkers, woodcutters.… What faces they had! What a shrewd, lively, and completely down-to-earth understanding of everything that went on! They were true poets in their everyday speech, so vivid and so inventive in their slang. And then the sight of the open breech of a 75mm cannon! The magic of the light on that white metal! One taste of all that, and I forgot about abstract art.”
Léger was gassed at Verdun, and at the end of 1917 he was let out of the hospital and discharged from the army. But to the day of his death, in 1955, he never forgot the strength, the endurance, the total realism, the quick wit, and the uncomplaining good sense of his comrades-in-arms. Nor did he stop believing that civilian life would one day reward them for their offhand and undeceived heroism. If his paintings could bring that day nearer, or if they could indicate the conditions in which it would come about, so much the better. He was, however, very careful at the start not to sentimentalize the working man, or to assign him a more important place in the cities of the future than he would actually occupy.
In the great metropolitan paintings that Léger produced in 1919 and 1920—above all, in The City—human beings play a subordinate part. Objects among other objects, they are not individualized: individuality was kept for moments when, as in The Mechanic, the working man was off duty and could smoke a cigarette. But he was not diminished, in Léger’s eyes, by his objecthood. Rather, it raised him to the same level—that of a functional elegance, a stripped-down beauty without precedent—that was the mark of every other element in the new metropolitan scene.
Not everyone, of course, looked with such favor on the first machine age. In the early 1920s Karl Čapek’s R.U.R. was welcomed in theaters all over the world for its defeatist preview of robot society. In 1932 René Clair’s À nous la liberté was enormously popular for its portrait of the dehumanizing effect of industrialization. Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936) is a further and definitive example of this same disenchantment. But Léger did not stand alone in his optimistic approach to the problems of the postwar world. In the social strivings of the 1920s the machine had a fundamental, and it was hoped a benevolent, part to play.
Léger made new friends who agreed with him on these issues—especially the great architect Le Corbusier, who in 1925 gave him his first opportunity as a mural painter. Léger also involved himself in filmmaking, stage design, and book illustration. He had a sure instinct for the people with whom it would be most worthwhile to collaborate: Darius Milhaud in music, André Malraux as a beginner in literature, Abel Gance and Man Ray in the cinema. What he did in association with them reached, as often as not, only a small audience, but he never quite lost the expansionist dream—the notion of a world in which art would be for everyone and everyone would be for art.
By 1924, it seemed to him as though that world was almost in sight, if only people would acknowledge it. There was no limit to the potential of the machine as a creator of beauty. There was no reason why, not only the shopwindows and billboards, but the entire architecture of the city street should not be a carnival for the eye. The automobile shows of the mid-1920s would have emptied the museums and bankrupted the theaters, in Léger’s view, if it were not for what he called “the hierarchical prejudice.” “There are no hierarchies in art,” he said over and over again; it was for the skilled craftsman to realize that what he produced was more beautiful than most of what people went to see in the Louvre.
The role of color in all this was primordial, and Léger never lost an opportunity of listing the benefits that would follow from the liberation of color in everyday life. He told Trotsky about them, when he and Trotsky met in Montparnasse during World War I. He told his students about them, when he lectured at Yale in 1938. And, quite rightly, he took a great pride in the fact of his own influence in the matter. “In 1919, I painted The City with pure colors laid flat on the canvas. It was a revolutionary step. I proved that a painter could discard chiaroscuro and discard modulation and yet still have depth in the picture. The advertising agencies soon took my point. My pure blues and reds and yellows were lifted from The City and put to work in posters and store windows, and by the side of the road, and in signals of every kind. Color had been set free. It was a reality in itself. It could act in itself and by itself, independently of all the objects which had previously had to contain or to carry it.…”
Léger had been to the United States for the first time in 1931. By October 1940, when he arrived there as a refugee, he knew his way around. Adaptable by nature, he thoroughly enjoyed himself in New York, and in the country near Lake Champlain, and even at La Guardia Field, where he liked to watch the aircraft come and go. He was polite and constructive in all his comments on America, and he acknowledged that certain of his dreams for society as a whole had been fulfilled there: in the spectacle of New York by night, for example. But he was quick to get back to France, in the winter of 1945, and once there, he set about renewing his lifelong love match with the French working class. He also let it be known that he had joined the French Communist Party.
It would be difficult at the present time to find a more conservative body of men—one more dependent, that is, on the status quo—than the French Communist Party. (This was made particularly clear in May 1968, when it was palpable to all that the last thing the French Communists wanted was to get power.) But in 1945 Léger thought quite sincerely that his adherence to the Party might bring nearer the day when the working classes would have the leisure to develop the new style of life that was theirs for the asking—and, in fact, he remained a Party member for the rest of his life. It had been very disagreeable for Léger to stand up in front of working-class audiences at the time of the Popular Front, in 1936–37, and be greeted with shouts of “You only work for the rich! Who wants to listen to you?” (It was not, however, so traumatic as to cause him to refuse a commission from Nelson Rocke-feller the next year.) Perhaps in a changed France all that could be changed, too?
It never was, really. If he was booed, it was no longer, admittedly, by the working class. I well remember the uproar that broke out in the stalls when Léger appeared in 1949 on the stage of the Opéra in Paris at the first performance of Milhaud’s Bolivar, for which he had designed the scenery. Aesthetic prejudice no doubt played a part in this, but the basic sound was that of the propertied classes baying for the Party member’s blood. The big commissions, however, still came from traditional sources: the Roman Catholic Church, above all. (“Nobody else asked me,” he would say, when taxed with escapism, “and I did so want to make big decorations.”) When he made paintings on the scale of epics, it was for himself primarily; and in his seventies he completed two huge complementary paintings on working-class themes—The Constructors in 1950 and The Great Parade in 1954.
These paintings do honor to Léger as a man: for his energy, his ambition, his largeness of heart. Léger had loved the circus all his life, and he tried to sum up his feelings for it in The Great Parade; The Constructors is a last salute to the children and grandchildren of the men with whom he had served in World War I. But there is a great difference between a painting that corresponds to an urgent social need—to something that has to be said—and one that does not. The two late paintings relate to a France that had already passed into history. They are descriptive, and by implication sentimental, in a way that Léger would never have permitted himself thirty years earlier. The style aspires to grandeur, but without the radical invention that marked the Three Women of 1921. “I’m a painter,” Léger once said. “I’m not in the description business.”
If in these two late paintings he ended up in “the description business,” it was because that particular simplistic view of the working classes was no longer valid. The machine had not, after all, turned out to be the instrument of social liberation; and in just about every country in the world the hard-hat had become the henchman of reaction. Neither at work nor at play did the construction worker of the 1950s match up to the New Man Léger had put on canvas thirty years earlier. That specific impulse—and that specific art—had had its moment of validity in the 1920s. Art was the poorer for its disappearance; mankind, also.