Anyone acquainted with Léger’s work shouldn’t be surprised that he lived in cities for most of his life. But before New York and Paris, before the Pavillon de l’Esprit Nouveau and the Galerie de l’Effort Moderne, before the Great War and Verdun, before the École Nationale Supérieure Des Arts Décoratifs and the Académie Julian, even before his apprenticeship under the architect in Caen, he was little Fernand, born the son of a provincial cattle breeder in 1881. Decades of urban life and international fame weren’t enough to sand off the rough speech, the ingenuousness, nor perhaps even the sunny naïveté of his childhood in the Normandy countryside.
Seven years after arriving in Paris, finding work as an architectural draughtsman, and imitating the Impressionists to little effect, the neophyte painter was radicalized by the posthumous exhibition of Cézanne at the 1907 Salon d’Automne. He tried his hand at Cubism. His paintings from 1909–11 evince his growing confidence, but yet lack the verve of Picasso and Braque.
With the brightening of his palette in 1912, his work became honest. He was a buoyant man, an enthusiast and fundamentally an optimist. He needed pure and radiant color to concentrate upon the canvas the beauty he saw in his world. That beauty was not the beauty which Corot, Courbet, Delacroix, and Monet had seen. It had not existed for them; they could not have painted it. Of this Léger was certain, anticipating by more than two decades Walter Benjamin’s observation that “the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity’s entire mode of existence.”
In a lecture given on the eve of the Great War in 1914 (and afterwards published in Apollinaire’s Les Soirées de Paris), Léger described the new conditions of perception imposed by industry and technology: the fragmentation of viewpoints aboard a speeding train or automobile, the contrasts introduced to the rural landscape through billboard ads and telegraph poles, the mouldings left upon patterns of thought and habits of sense by the scintillant spectacle of film, and the festivizing of the urban landscape by colorful bills and advertisements. It was incumbent upon the painter, Léger argued, to embrace these developments. “If pictorial expression has changed,” he said, “it is because modern life had necessitated it.”
On July 28, Austria-Hungary invaded Serbia. On August 3, Germany declared war on France. Later that month, Léger was called to serve in the army’s engineer corps.
Many years later, he would recall the day he glimpsed something of the sublime in the reflection of the sun on the polished barrel of a French 75 as the critical switch point in his life, the origin of his fascination with the machine per se as the epitome of what he called the “logical spirit in art.” During those moments, he acquired a new eye with which to look on the world.
In a 2015 article published in Études Lawrenciennes, the French academic Brigitte Macadré-Nguyên combs through Léger’s wartime letters, and observes that the conscripted artist’s experience of the war was much more terrible than his later writings and utterances might suggest. “He tried to protect himself from the human damages he witnessed…by distancing himself from them and theorizing about it,” she writes. “Again, the terms he used are like so many protective layers against the aggression of such inhuman, soul-tearing surroundings: ‘curious,’ ‘intelligent,’ ‘linear,’ ‘lifeless,’ ‘perfect orchestration,’ ‘pure abstraction,’ ‘a cubist war’…”
If Léger had perished in the gas attack that hospitalized him in 1917, posterity would have regarded him as a painter of some merit, but little importance. His canvases might be brought out from storage or taken on loan to round out exhibitions of Cubism or late Belle Epoque art; the catalogs would call attention to his idiosyncratic “tubist” style. But that would be all. It was only after his convalescence in Paris that he achieved for the first time the untrammeled expression of his genius, reinventing his art in an eruption of inspiration and activity.
The points of contact between Léger’s output during the half-decade of his Mechanical Period and the Synthetic Cubism of the early 1910s are obvious. His paintings distort, multiply, and amalgamate the dimensions of objects and bodies, though their signature innovation resides in their emphasis upon the operational necessities that dictate structure. Léger abstracts the aesthetics of precision and purposiveness from the technologically advanced urban environment to create static montages of modern existence in the visual language of its material complexity.
Brightly colored concentric arcs and circles abide in and project from nebulous conflations of edifice and artifice, beaming, glad, and lyrical. Warm, pure colors pacify fitful geometries suggestive of metal construction and radial motion, zeroing the opposing forces and suggesting a weightless equilibrium. Disintegrated rods and girders, traffic signs, and discontinuous colored spaces evocative of exterior walls and inlaid pathways thrust the viewer into a state of familiarity and perplexity. As experienced as we are with the topography of the built environment and knowledgeable of the functions of architectural and mechanical forms, we seem to comprehend what we see on Léger’s canvases, and we seem to recognize what we see—but seldom at the same time.
Though Léger didn’t eschew representations of the human figure during this phase of his career, he seldom prioritized them—even when one might be the nominal subject of a painting. Most of the time they are either interfused with the artifice surrounding them, or reduced to gray automata of cylinders, polygons, and circles, milling about environments animated by an electric élan vital of a higher order. (Macadré-Nguyên believes this is an after-effect of the Great War: “he refused to consider the vulnerability of the body's flesh and bones…almost as if Léger was painting life and colour around bodies that seem transformed into shell-like objects, shells to be understood both as artillery parts and crustacean appendices.”)
This depersonalizing of the human form is strange to observe in the work of a School of Paris luminary renowned for his populist compassion. Criticizing the bourgeoisie came naturally to Western Europe’s avant-garde in the early twentieth century, but Léger was unusual in that he was also an outspoken advocate for the proletariat. No doubt his peasant upbringing partially explains his fondness for day laborers and artisans—but in the artist’s own recollection, it was his love for the soldiers with whom he struggled and suffered at the front that kindled his lifelong affinity for les gens ordinaires.
Nevertheless, Léger was every inch an artist, and his first loyalty was to the beautiful. Convinced that technological progress and urbanization were his age’s fountainhead of beauty—and believing powerfully that beauty per se could and must improve the general human condition—he was obliged to place them above criticism.
Though his secret crisis of 1928 was yet a long time off, while working on the The City in 1919 he experienced his first premonition of a problem.
Nearly eight feet tall and ten feet long, The City looms over the viewer as a disjointed hallucination of facades, trusses, girders, railings, signs, and electric lights in the night. The staircase occupied by a pair of featureless automaton-people constitutes a central axis which is not the painting’s focal point, but rather an isthmus of intelligible space from which the gray pedestrians idly view the sensory-overloading spectacle which literally absorbs them.
Léger knew The City was to be his opus, the climax at which his post-Armistice infatuation with urbanism and technology must inevitably arrive. Over ten preparatory studies, variously rendered in oil, watercolor, gauche, ink, and graphite, belong to museums across Europe, America, and Asia. Others undoubtedly exist in private collections. Strange to say, some of these studies give the gallery visitor greater occasion for silent contemplation than the final version. Compared to other 1919 efforts like The Level Crossing and The Typographer, The City somehow seems incomplete.
For Léger, the piece’s shortcomings represented a regrettable but necessary compromise.
As he planned The City, testing and refining his vision through study after study, he found himself inexplicably provoked by the developing image. Even though the piece was shaping up well enough from a technical standpoint, something about it aroused his mislike—something exceedingly subtle, something that its colors, shapes, and depths quietly implied in the particulars of their union, but which he couldn’t put his finger on.
He was perhaps even more disturbed to begin feeling the same disagreeable twinge when he looked over his other recent works. In Still Life, he sensed it most acutely in the black circle behaving as a fulcrum for the two red bars, and in the parley between these elements and adjacent formation of rods and a gray cylinder. The logic of the composition had of course prescribed their organization—but in following that logic, he seemed to have introduced a heteronomous element into the painting.
That same element abided in the space limned by the red arc, the black rectangle, the violet-red bar in the upper-left corner of his study for The Level Crossing. In The Red Disc, he saw it within the triangular field of influence whose vertices were the banded semicircle, the purple circle, and the pipe-shaped yellow-orange figure.
To his relief, he discovered that if he scrutinized a canvas like a parent interrogating a troublemaking child, the strange sub rosa conversations between colors and forms would cease—but only ever temporarily.
The one person to whom Léger spoke of this was his fiancée Jeanne-Augustine Lohy. He didn’t describe his misgivings in detail, and he framed the situation in playful terms. Mon diablotin, he called it—a little devil or imp bent on meddling in the construction of his city. Lohy answered what she heard as genial self-deprecation and the fatigue of overexertion with benign reassurances.
“Above all,” Léger would later write in 1938, “it is a matter of loving art, not understanding it.” We should not then be surprised at his reluctance to probe his own misgivings. As his work on The City intensified, he was less interested in determining the cause of his unease than ridding himself of it and bringing his labors to their satisfactory conclusion.
Each study that brought The City closer to its ultimate iteration exacerbated the problem. The more closely an image approximated the perfection of the idea, the more saliently its alien constituents leapt out at him. To his frustration, none of the friends and colleagues who visited him in his studio claimed to see anything awry, even when he directed their attention to the groupings of objects that agitated him. Their feedback was almost uniformly positive. If le diablotin and its vandalisms escaped their discernment, what did he have to fear from the gaze of the public?
But he would see them. He knew the stories about Degas pertinaciously reworking pieces that had already been exhibited and sold, painting over flaws visible only to himself—and the more he thought about it, the more easily he could imagine making himself ridiculous in the same way.
He finally decided upon a method of optimization, seeking the golden mean by which The City could achieve the most of what he demanded of it with a minimum of interference from his little demon. A drawn-out process of trial and error yielded many more studies and false starts than he’d hoped the undertaking would require.
The City was first displayed at London’s Mansard Gallery in September 1919, and made its local debut at the Salon des Indépendants in January 1920. It was a standout, a sensation, received with wonder, admiration, and oftentimes shock. Though it fell short of what Léger had envisioned, it was good enough, and its novelty and audacity went a long way toward compensating for its deficiencies. For the most part, the artist was satisfied, and confident that as his preoccupation with The City subsided, the peculiar tricks his imagination played on him would likewise come to an end.
Months later, he still dimly but consistently sensed conspiracies between fields of color, the edges of warped perspectives, and the proportions of opposing figures.
By this time, he’d learned to counterplot against his subliminal saboteur. Where a harmonious convergence of vertices faintly aggravated him, he’d obscure it with a black circle; where a yellow was implicated, he’d change it to an ochre. Most of the time, the results were immediate: with the compositional circuit broken, the aura of the uncanny dimmed and went out.
In 1920, a new addition to his Mechanical Elements series was coming together as a protuberant nexus of figures resembling valves, axles, pistons, pins, and crankshafts, all foregrounded against an eccentric mosaic pattern of white, red, yellow, and black. This time, he discovered he could not ameliorate the problem by introducing minor deviations. Every division of forms which he deliberately overstated, every attempt to thwart the connotations of a reticulate gray figure with the addition of blue vertical stripes, and every black border he painted to mitigate the effect of a nodal circle nearby were all in vain. Somehow or other, all of his countermeasures played into his demon’s pranks.
Relief came when, on a whim, he reconfigured the congeries’ upper portion into the facsimile of a shoulder, a neck, and a partial human face in profile. Though he couldn’t explain why, he felt immediately more at ease. The painting belonged to him again. He subsequently began anew, using the aborted piece as a template.
The finished painting, titled The Mechanic, signaled the gradual recession of Léger’s Mechanical Period. Though geometrized, the piece’s central figure is neither an automaton nor a splintered ghost in a machine. He stands alive and independent. From his poise and aspect, we intuit something of his selfhood.
In one sense, the massive Three Women (Le Grand Dejeuner) of 1922 was a further step in the direction towards which the bellwether Mechanic pointed. In another, it must be seen as a retreat. Its nudes are more cloudlike than robotic, with gradient shading highlighting their smooth, rounded contours. Unlike the subject of The Mechanic, they are impersonal ciphers, abstract pictographs of humanity. They are human objects.
The artist would later say that after the intensity of his Mechanical Period’s peak, he had intended to rediscover the human face, and “felt a need for large, static figures”—both of which were true, after a fashion. The fact was that human faces and figures evidently made his imp insecure of coming out to play.
Léger’s early 1920s portraits comport with an adage of his friend and collaborator, the architect Le Corbusier: “a house is a machine for living in.” Organized with the austerity of an engineer and an architect’s sense of structural harmony, these interior scenes consist of dense, polychromatic configurations of interlocked parts. Although the aloof faces of the paintings’ nominal subjects capture the viewer’s gaze, the figures appear not as occupants of a home, but as components of an idling, elegant engine, or as the load-bearing caryatids on which a composition’s balance depends.
Understanding that a representation of a person and a representation of a flower in a vase were each no more nor less than aesthetic objects, Léger knew the human identity of the figures was no prophylactic in and of itself. It was rather the regulative effect of his portrait subjects’ rounded profiles, bulky clarity, and gaze-ballasting faces that prevented his demon’s intervention.
Still lifes were also relatively safe. A piece such as Still Life with a Beer Mug had to be painted with caution, but was less susceptible to interference than Rooftops of Paris, The Bridge, and The Large Tugboat. (The execution of the latter had been particularly difficult, and in the end Léger forced his demon to a stalemate by concealing its every point of entry with billowing gray clouds or waves.) Restricting a composition’s scope to a drinking vessel, silverware, and a bowl of fruit on a small table usually gave the interloper too narrow an opening to cause much mischief, and obviated the need for large, static human figures.
By 1924, the artist’s increasing preference for still lifes brought him into alignment with the Purist ethos espoused by his friend Le Corbusier and the painter Amédée Ozenfant. In addition to stressing clarity, rationality, and parsimony in representational art, Purism extolled industry and technology—all of which appealed to Léger. The paintings of his Purist period deracinate the crisply stylized objects of his portraits and still lifes, magnify and iconize them, and mount them upon placid, earth-toned geometric fields. In the machine-like outlines and irregular widgets embellishing the rectilinear frames over which his subjects are fixed like enshrined relics, his undiminished interest in mechanical forms resurfaces.
Throughout the mid-1920s, Léger continued to produce new iterations of Mechanical Element from time to time, though these later variations on the theme are considerably more restrained and disciplined than their predecessors. He was loath to admit that their syntactical deviations from their earlier counterparts were not so much the product of a natural stylistic evolution, but of a secret neurosis.
He also continued to paint portraits. Some of these, such as Women Holding A Vase, decidedly qualify as Purist productions. Others appear as strange intermediary efforts, and often have an air of reluctant obligation. In the representative Three Girls on Red Background—whose eponymous characters look to be composed of marble or cement, with their limbs, necks, and digits fastened in place with screws—Léger places his human figures in a vacuum, divorced from interior scenes and manufactured articles. Given the uncharacteristically drab result, it seems obvious that he would have much rather painted the interior in which they weren’t appearing, and the objects with which they weren’t interacting.
Years afterward, Léger claimed that Purism never appealed to him. “Too thin for me, that closed-in world,” he said. “But it had to be done all the same; someone had to go to the extreme.” No doubt he spoke truthfully, but the remark does prompt the question as to why he devoted nearly half a decade to an art-world trend he found much less than exhilarating.
His friendship with Le Corbusier was a factor. Not only did the architect share his enthusiastic fascination with technological progress, but was possessed of a more systematic intellect, capable of precisely articulating ideas Léger could only feel at. Moreover, aligning his practice with Purism posed the possibility of a compromise between his passions and his compunctions. He could celebrate the neoteric beauty of his century without invoking the ligature of organization which, even when subjected to a high degree of abstraction, invariably became the loci of those unaccountable solecisms that had privately embarrassed him for nearly a decade.
By 1928, Purism had run its course. Léger’s enthusiasm for producing works in the mode of the Baluster and Blue Guitar and Vase was on the wane, despite his efforts to rekindle it with stylistic innovations. It was altogether too inert. Too stringent and remote. He conceded that he had gradually and intentionally ceased to paint what he most desired to paint, and could no longer justify to himself his decision to steer his life’s work away from the very polestar of his inspiration.
In the summer of 1928 he sequestered himself in his studio, resolved to get back to the source, to reinvest in the vision that had guided him to the Mechanical Elements, to The Level Crossing and The City. If he couldn’t work through the neurosis that made him shrink from wielding his powers at their fullest, then he intended at the least to finally demystify it to himself.
He worked in solitude for nineteen days, and preserved nothing of what he produced during that time.
During the first week, he composed over fifty sketches and studies in graphite, watercolor, and gouache. A decade had passed since the start of his Mechanical Period; he spent long hours relearning the old style he’d trained himself to abstain from. As he worked, he’d sometimes repeat phrases like “Mechanical Element,” “Radio Tower,” or “Linotype Machine” to help him visualize what a composition might be trying to move toward, and anticipate how he could most effectively coordinate its dual aspects as a vehicle for pure aesthetic experience and as a representation (or suggestion) of concrete things in the world.
When his demon got involved, he willed himself to ignore it—but not always successfully.
On the seventh day, while contemplating the rods, concentric discs, and their interactions with a dispersed black and yellow lattice in a piece provisionally called “Automobile on the Boulevard,” he arrived at his first epiphany.
The style he devised after returning home from the trenches had been an outgrowth of his idiosyncratic approach to Cubism. As such, his initial understanding of its principles and possibilities was freighted with a sensibility cultivated in the wake of the Salon d’Automne, and through his prewar dialogue of collegial competition with Picasso, Braque, Gris, Le Fauconnier, and the Delaunays.
A decade and a half later, he could now see how little he had comprehended his own methods. His mechanical paintings had stipulated a new criterion for themselves, one which was at variance with that of early Cubism. What he’d mistaken for an alien value making itself at home in his compositions had been, in reality, intuitions of the principles which his developing praxis demanded, entering into his paintings through him during those moments of uncertainty where he trusted his instincts and consented to obey what appeared to be the interior logic of an inchoate arrangement of colors and volumes.
He couldn’t have described to Le Corbusier these criteria in precise, intelligible terms; his gift was for creative synthesis, not critical analysis. But now he could see where and how a painting adhered to them, and believed he could consciously allow them to guide him in his work.
During the second week, he produced ten paintings. Seven were studies in gouache on paper. Three were aborted oil paintings.
At the beginning of the third week, he began to paint with oils on a 51” by 38” canvas.
By the fifth day, the work was as near to completion as he cared to take it.
Before taking a knife to the untitled painting and consigning its shreds to the rubbish bin with all the rest, Léger invited the art dealer Léonce Rosenberg to have a look at it. Rosenberg studied it for a long time before tactfully telling his client that while he could appreciate a return to the gusto of The City and The Discs, he did not believe this would be a fruitful avenue to persist in exploring.
Léger promised the painting was only an idle experiment, and reassured Rosenberg by showing him Playing Card and Pipe and Yellow Composition.
In truth, Rosenberg was at a loss. He was no stranger to the avant-garde, and understood Léger’s work as well as anyone—but this painting was an aberration. Like many of Léger’s mechanical pieces, it was a bright concatenation of technological and architectural forms that might be interpreted as lamps, wheels, typebars, rubber tubing, rotors, belts, and girders, all situated within an implosive pillar of pure-toned reticulations. At the interstices of this activity, in what seemed to be a background, there massed a pullulation of earth-toned curves, segmented ellipses, and orbs. Despite recognizing the detached exuberance that was so familiar to him in the artist’s work, Rosenberg tentatively sensed something of the foreboding in the piece, though he couldn’t put a name to it.
A moment before he passed his judgement on the new painting, it occurred to Rosenberg that it somehow made him think of Goya’s Colossus. He did not pause to consider why; his primary concern was dissuading his client from attempting to bring it or anything else like it to the market.
Had Rosenberg voiced his thought about the Colossus, Léger might have admitted that he too was reminded of Goya, but rather of his Saturn Devouring His Son. To the artist’s understanding, the painting suggested a bizarre reversal: Jupiter poised to seize and devour Saturn.
Léger saw in it the adumbrated personification of an element, epitomized as though by collage—like a dada portrait of Henry Ford made from clipped photographs of Model T automobiles, manufacturing equipment, and assembly line workers. The subject was none other than his demon, revealed at last as the very eidolon of the principles necessitated by his abstract mechanical aesthetic, equipollent to the technical exigencies which determined the forms of the machinery, architectural elements, and manufactured objects whose quiddities his art illuminated.
The demon emerged as the agglutination of the capabilities which humanity transferred from itself to its tools, wherein brute animal physiology attained the abstract purity of force vectors, elasticity moduli, and fluid dynamics. The demon was the wheels, hydraulic systems, and motors with which man made his limbs and muscles exterior to himself, delegating their work to tireless, uncomplaining helots singularly optimized for their tasks. The demon was the pipes, pistons, flywheels, and furnaces that inseminated the hard order of the world with the functional life of man’s heart, lungs, and sinews, liberating his will from its dependence on the irresolute strength of flesh and bone. It was electric lighting as a vision-enhancing prosthetic and the motion picture camera as a corrective for man’s wandering, blinking eye. It was the machine guns, howitzers, and fighter planes in which resided the unalloyed determination of man’s will to violence. It was the miracle of mechanized industry, it was telegraph poles and undersea cables, it was the airplane and the submarine, the bulldozer and the combine harvester; it was the metropolitan landscape in which humanity read its identity and destiny in hieroglyphics of stucco, concrete, steel, and glass, and it spoke its thoughts in the accents of locomotive boilers, rivet guns, internal combustion engines, propellers, dynamos, radio static, and—yes—in the roar and whine of artillery at Verdun.
The demon was not any of these things, pe se: the expatriated human capacities that “lived” in them merely comprised its anatomy. The artist, adventitiously coming upon the secret, reconstituted in a composite image all that humanity had given of itself to its mechanical expedients, painting an entity that was at once a landscape, an ecology, a new organism devising its own birth—with man as its imperfect template, the guileless instrument of its begetting upon the world, the nursemaid feeding and strengthening it.
Hours after Rosenberg’s departure, holding the demon’s eyeless gaze in the sweltering Parisian midnight, the artist deliriously half-convinced himself of a deeper design. A geometry latent in the air and earth, in the mindless slumber of dissolute matter, vying to be become. A primordial will fixated on the possibility of straight lines and level plains intersecting at right angles. Of convergences at vertices. Of concentric Giotto circles, tessellated grids, of serial patterns proliferating like crystal lattices on the face of the world. Of cylinders, discs, and rods oscillating with the immaculate resonance of celestial motions—the music of the spheres.
He kept coming back to that phrase: la musique des spheres. It reminded him of Wassily Kandinsky, whose acquaintance he had made before the war, and of the Theosophical nonsense to which the Russian painter subscribed. Or was it nonsense? Comme ci-dessus, donc ci-dessous…
The hylozoic conspiracy required an unwitting but willing agent. It selected the apes that descended from the trees, grasped stones and sticks in their forepaws, and smeared pigment on cave walls. They were congenitally receptive to the design (by coincidence, or had it been set in motion eons before?) and could be made to appreciate that advancing it could help them to satisfy their squalid needs. They obligingly chiseled wheels from stone. Planted crops in parallel rows. Carved terraces into hillsides. Extrapolated the forms of the arch, regular polygon, and plane from their jumbled environs and instantiated them in architecture. They became missionaries consecrating a coarse and discordant planet, ameliorating the bristling anarchy of forests, meadows, and marshes by levelling them, smoothing them out and raising cities over them, erecting ziggurats, obelisks, domes, and spires. They learned to discern “superior sensations of a mathematical order” (to use Le Corbusier and Ozenfant’s phrasing), and reproduced them in water wheels, gearwork, steam engines, turbines, Maxim guns, motion picture reels, and dipole antennae—and in the discrete, metronomic operations of rationalized industry, which takes on a logic and purpose of its own.
That was it, then. The metropolis and the machine, invented to advance human ends, come to dictate those ends, and finally instate themselves as ends. Humanity becomes the means, amenably conforming to the will of a geometer demiurge dreaming of its own conception. The transubstantiated music of the spheres at last rises skyward to embrace itself, shattering its human chrysalis…
It was nearly dawn when the artist draped a sheet over the canvas and tried to get some sleep. He destroyed it the next day.
To all appearances, the episode did nothing to diminish Léger’s characteristic optimism. “When this civilization reaches maturity,” he wrote in an essay published by Variétés in 1929, and dedicated to Le Corbusier, “we are going to live in the light, in clarity and nudity. Therein lies a source of joy that is entirely new, our Future.”
Not long afterwards followed the second and last great transformation of his career.
During the 1930s, he transitioned from a strain of Cubism toward an organic, primitivist style. The objects in his still lifes come to look like bubbles in lava lamps. His Purist constructions grow less austere; intelligible naturalistic objects commingle with abstract manufactured articles in looser, airier spaces than before. He paints musicians, bathers, Adam and Eve, and lands upon an enduring theme in portraits of acrobats. His human objects at last become human subjects.
During his exile in New York from 1940 through 1945, he painted swimmers and dancers as fluid preponderances of fleshy limbs, and bright postcard scenes of his adopted city. After returning to Paris at the conclusion of the second World War, he had an especial interest in painting scenes of people at leisure, typically at a riverside in the country.
Several paintings from the decade evince Léger’s rejuvenated interest in the natural world. His still lifes and prints center butterflies, birds, and flowers imbued with such life and softness as to sometimes appear not only weightless, but gelatinous. In The Tree in the Ladder, living wood heaves against the frieze-patterned signifiers of civilization. While he still occasionally composed new additions to his Mechanical Elements series, even these are possessed of a protean or even protoplasmic quality totally absent from their early predecessors.
While this transition was underway, he grew more outspoken in his advocacy for the laborers who sweated in the factories, maintained the metropolitan wheels and motors, and erected the structures which defined a city as such—and who had benefitted little from France’s manufacturing boom during the 1920s. “They have a right to demand that time’s revolution be carried out,” he wrote in 1937, “and that they in their turn be permitted to enter the domain of the beautiful, which has always been closed to them up to now.” He lobbied Georges Huisman, director of the Beaux-Arts, to open the galleries in the evenings for visiting workmen. He painted murals to share his work freely in public spaces.
Having already joined the the Association of Revolutionary Writers and Artists in 1932, he became a member of the French Communist Party in 1945. His refusal to adopt the aesthetic of socialist realism was a matter of some controversy.
In the landmark Constructors of 1950, tanned laborers in the garb of their class earn their day’s wage high up in a framework of girders and trusses, foregrounded against a warm blue sky. Four men cooperate in hoisting a heavy bar; two boughs, one leafy, lie mysteriously at their feet. A fifth worker observes at the top of a ladder, clasping a handhold concealed in the spatially impossible structure. Straddling an I-beam, a sixth man tends to his own task. A patent dignity invests the laborers and their work.
Like its antecedent from thirty years earlier, The Constructors sets humanity and its artefacts in juxtaposition—but now the relation exposed is one of reciprocity rather than the subordination of man to mechanism.
Throughout his final years, Léger went on exalting the modern condition in terms no less certain than before. In his lectures and essays, he defended the presence of billboards in rural landscapes, mused about technological advances that might allow people to live inside spherical homes, and likened the precarity of the atomic age and Cold War to the exhilarating performance of an acrobat without a safety net.
Fernand Léger died on August 17, 1955. His last great work was the The Grand Parade, completed in 1954.
Knowing about the artist’s demon and its challenge to his faith, what are we to think of his response?
I can imagine two possibilities.
In the first, he confronts the apparition of his demon and is made to understand both the inexorability and the implications of the process it augurs. After wrestling with these visions for a time, he commits himself to defying them. He calls the bluff. He declares that the outcome is not inevitable. His work becomes a celebration of humanity, a confident assertion that our moral intelligence will guide us through the hazardous strait between the sterile, grinding unlife which is mechanical rationality’s ultimate conclusion and the civilizational collapse which would be the outcome of a reactionary retreat, ultimately delivering us unto a perfect future wherein we can all of us live in light, clarity, and joy.
But I can just as easily believe that his answer was one of stubborn disavowal. Having dismissed the emissary he summoned, he puts its prophecy from his mind. He goes on lauding the marvels of the modern age and forecasting the beautiful, brilliant future to be forged from a tumultuous present while he conscientiously avoids painting anything that would too forcefully remind him of his feverish night at the precipice of revelation—or worse, return him to the ledge, and threaten the plausibility of his denial. His work becomes buoyant, bright, and simplistic. He paints musicians and circus performers in glad colors because they are beloved of the common people, and he paints common people because he loves them, and because he knows in the shadows of his heart that they will bear the worst of what’s to come as the world succumbs to the empyrean reason of the machine, the music of the spheres.
It’s useless to speculate. Léger was such a man that either ingenuous optimism or willful prevarication would have yielded the same result. That was the peculiar quality of his genius, and perhaps also of his failure.
Sylvia Plath once said that nothing stinks like unpublished writing, and this little fiction has been collecting mold in the back of my fridge ever since I got sick of submitting it to lit zines a couple years ago. Even after retooling it a bit here, I’m not sure how well it actually works—but it was a fun experiment.
Three notes:
1.) Not that I spent that much time playing around with them, but I’m kind of pleased that all of the AI image generators I used completely failed to imitate Léger’s mechanical aesthetic. The pic I ultimately settled on was the least bad of the lot, and was only serviceable as a grayscaled detail.
2.) The excerpts from Brigitte Macadré-Nguyên were new additions, and when I found them they were just too good not to use. There’s a lot of merit to the idea that the artist’s Mechanical Period was a protracted trauma response.
3.) In reality, I think Léger might have been a little bit like Marshall McLuhan in that his true feelings about the machine age were somewhat more ambivalent than what his public expressions convey. (This excerpt of a 1922 letter, which I read for the first time the other day, truly surprised me. Its tone is really quite different from what he was saying in lectures and publishing in journals—though it’s possible his next sentence was “and that’s a good thing.”)