Fernand Leger: The Complete Story
Figures built from gleaming tubes and cylinders, as if people had been assembled in a factory. Fernand Leger loved the machine age so much that he painted human beings to look like polished engine parts, and made one of the most distinctive styles of the twentieth century.
He was a French artist, an early Cubist who broke away to celebrate the modern world of machines, workers and the city, in a manner sometimes called Tubism.
Tubism
Leger started close to Cubism, but where Picasso and Braque broke things into facets, he built his forms from smooth cylinders and cones.
Critics nicknamed the style Tubism, and his rounded, metallic figures look proudly mechanical, citizens of a new industrial age.
The beauty of the machine
Leger believed the machine was beautiful, and filled his work with gears, scaffolding, road signs and factory shapes in strong primary colours.
He wanted an art for the modern city and the worker, bright and clear, moving steadily toward abstract art without ever leaving the real world behind.
The war and the worker
Serving in the First World War changed him. He was struck by the beauty of gun barrels in sunlight and by the ordinary soldiers around him, and afterward put working people at the centre of his art.
A committed leftist, he painted builders, cyclists and acrobats as modern heroes, dignified and strong.
Beyond the canvas
Leger spread his ideas across many forms. He made a pioneering abstract film, designed for the theatre and the ballet, taught widely and created murals and stained glass.
He spent the war years of the 1940s in the United States, where the energy of New York and its billboards fed straight into his late work.
Questions about Fernand Leger
What is he known for?
Machine age paintings of tubular figures, sometimes called Tubism.
How does he differ from Picasso?
He built forms from smooth cylinders rather than sharp facets.
What did he celebrate?
The machine, the city and the working person.
When did he die?
In 1955.
Why the machine man endures
Leger looked at the modern world of factories and crowds and decided it was beautiful, not frightening, and built a whole style to prove it. His gleaming workers and bright machine shapes still feel optimistic, a vision of art made for everyone in the age of the engine.
A museum devoted entirely to his work stands in the south of France, filled with his murals, mosaics and ceramics as well as his paintings. His influence reached far into graphic design and architecture, so the clean, confident look of mid century posters and public art owes a real debt to the painter who turned people into engines. He worked tirelessly across a long career, and his late American years gave his work a fresh jolt of colour and scale drawn from the energy of New York streets. His art for the worker and the city found admirers among architects and designers, and his clear, confident shapes shaped public art and graphic design for decades after his death. He even worked on stained glass and mosaic for churches and public buildings, carrying his clear primary colours and strong outlines into glass and stone for the widest possible audience. A whole museum in the south of France is given over to his work, where visitors can walk among his murals and mosaics and feel the full ambition of his art for the modern age.