With all the glory that later came as being a blue chip artist, Fernand Léger’s career spans from early investigations of painting as a means of capturing modern sensations in abstract and near abstract dynamic compositions to heroic images of common life in terms that admit their debt to the great tradition of French classicism and to folk art.

His paintings affirmed contemporary life as well as art’s energies. After years of admiring the granddaddy of pop art, I was able to collect (via the power of Google, of course) dozens of his art work – the ones that spoke directly to me.

This is the first of three posts about Léger’s work. Fernand Léger (1881 – 1955) was a French painter, son of a Norman cattle-breeder. He was a trained architect who moved to Paris at the turn of the 20th Century. While living in the city of lights, he studied painting, moved in the social circle of the great artists at that time: Apollinaire, the Delaunays and the poet Cendras. His art was deeply influenced by Cézanne. After the showing of his first major paintings in 1911, he developed his form of Cubism, dominated contrasts of form and color, positive and negative, at times in abstract compositions.


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