Word: gers
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Space. In Divers, Léger wanted to show the human body "revolving in space without any point of contact with the ground.'' After innumerable studies of figures, single or in pairs, and a few studies of abstract shapes, entwined like dancers, he produced a climactic picture (see color). It is a jigsaw of figures tumbling, hurtling, plummeting, yet all interlocked. As the eye examines them, they seem to begin to whirl, as if Léger had painted them on a pinwheel...
Manhattan's Guggenheim Museum last week put up a large and dazzling Léger show revolving around five major paintings-The Divers, The Country Outing, The Builders, The Cyclists and The Grand Parade-each of which is the climax of scores of paintings and sketches on the same theme. These themes preoccupied Léger for more than ten years before his death, at 74, in 1955. The climactic paintings (he called them "états définitijs") are among his finest, and at least one, Grand Parade, may be his masterpiece...
...from Architecture. Léger's artistic beginnings were in architecture; he was apprenticed at 16 to an architect in Caen, and he went on to serve in the office of another architect in Paris before he embarked on a painting career of his own. He passed through a brief phase of impressionism, but rejected it as belonging to a "naturally melodious" era gone...
...fell under the spell of Cezanne, later said that it took him all of three years to shake it. Some of his early canvases look vaguely like the work of Braque or Gris, but Léger was never to be a cubist. What interested him was not dissection but construction; while the cubists shattered the surface of reality and the surrealists explored the world of dreams, Léger clung to the familiar objects and figures all about him, using them like brightly colored blocks to build his compositions...
...ger saw his fill of suffering in World War I, but the image he carried away with him was the dazzling light of a breechblock gleaming in the sun. When he visited the U.S. some years later, he found beauty not in the lofty mountains or endless plains but in the hectic pace of the cities and their neon gaudiness. He painted the human figure, but said that for him "the human figure has no more importance than keys or bicycles. These are for me objects of plastic value to be used as I wished." He could consciously ignore...