Tools As Art: The Hechinger Collection

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Fernand Léger, Les Constructeurs, 1951
lithograph
17 1/2 x 23 in.

Fernand Léger was born in Argentan, France, in 1881 and died in Grif-sur-Yvette, France, in 1955. One of the great masters of the twentieth century, Léger continues to exert a lasting influence on generations of younger artists. After being apprenticed to an architect in Caen from 1897 to 1899, Léger worked as an architectural draftsman in Paris from 1900 to 1902. He spent the next year in military service. In 1903, although he was refused regular admission to the  École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, he took classes there, as well as studying art in Jean-Lèon-Gérôme's studio at the Académie Julian. The 1907 Cézanne retrospective had a powerful effect on Léger, contributing to his nascent interest in light and in manufactured objects. By 1910 he had met most of the Parisian avant-garde and had joined Robert Delaunay, Albert Gleizes, and others in the creation of La Section d'Or group of Cubist artists. The following year he exhibited in the Salon des Indépendants in Paris. Léger's version of Cubism emphasized bold designs of primary, tonal colors and streamlined forms suggestive of machines. His fighting experience in World War I prompted a return to a more concrete subject matter and a stricter formal order that was a contrast to the chaos of human life and the vicissitudes of nature. Along with members of De Stijl and the Purist movements, he envisioned a positive social function for art. Léger called his metallic style the "new realism" because it reduced all forms, including the human body, into machinelike images. At the same time, he endowed his everyday, quasi-cartoonish figures with a heroic sense. An extremely versatile artist, he also worked as an illustrator and set designer. In the 1930s he made two visits to the United States, and he lived in self-imposed exile in New York from 1940 to 1946. In the 1930s and 1940s he exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the San Francisco Museum of Art, and the Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge Massachusetts. Following his return to France, he had exhibitions at the Musée National d'Art Moderne and the Tate Gallery, London. He became involved in numerous large-scale projects, creating murals and stained-glass windows for secular and religious buildings. He also turned his artistic energies increasingly to ceramics, mosaics, and sculpture, addressing the themes of peace and love. Since his death, he has been the subject of numerous exhibitions worldwide.