3. Background Started: Architect's draftsman Photo retoucher Failed to get into his first art school: ( Ecole des Beaux- Arts) Got into a different School: ( Ecole des Arts Decoratifs, and Academic Julian)
18. Quotes Man needs color to live; it's just as necessary an element as fire and water. Enormous enlargements of an object or a fragment give it a personality it never had before, and in this way, it can become a vehicle of entirely new lyric and plastic power.
Fernand was originally trained as an architect’s draughtsman and photographer retoucher.In 1903 He failed his entrance exam into ecole des beaux Art school. Instead he studied at Ecole des arts Decoratifs and the Academic Julian.
In 1909 Leger was ranked as one of the top three cubists. He became a member if the Puteaux group in 1911. Leger was one of the first cubists to experiment with with non- figurative abstraction, constructing curvilinear forms against a rectangular grid.
Cubism is defined as a non objective subject of painting and sculpture developed in Paris in the early 20th century, characterized by the reduction and fragmentation of natural forms into abstract, often geometric structures usually rendered as a set of discrete planes.
The Bargeman, shows a boat set against a background dominated by the facades of houses, provided the artist with the opportunity to combine several of his favorite themes: motion, the city, and men at work. With colorful and overlapping disks, cylinders, cones, and diagonals.
In the city,Fernand Leger paints brilliance, excitement and unbound vitality of modern urban life. Solid Flat shapes, angles and curves, areas of light and dark. And Lines of motion and rest, all exist simultaneously. Our eyes dart from scaffolding, apartment buildings, stairs and stenciled letters to billowing smoke, robotic figures, silhouettes and an imposing telephone pole.
Leger use of streamlined forms derived from mechanical imagery dates from WWI, When he served in the French Army. His fondness for military hardware and its gleaming surfaces coincided with his feelings of solidarity with the foot soldiers surrounding him in the trenches.
Leger renounced abstraction during the first world war, when he claims to have discovered the beauty of common objects, which he described as everyday poetic images. He began to paint in a precise and clean style.
Leger taught at Yale and mills college from 1940-1945.
Leger worked with Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. These were the other two leading cubists of his time.
Leger continually experimented with color, shape, movement and space. Fernand Died near Paris on August 17 1955.