Word: leger
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...politics, issuing pretentious manifestos. Not so their Belgian cousins; "the subversive act," said one, the writer Paul Nouge, "must be discreet." Magritte's style, as it evolved, was studiously neutral. His early work, in the 1920s, was mainly exercises in late Cubism -- the "tubist," streamlined, geometrical forms of Fernand Leger and Amedee Ozenfant, shapes that might have been made from metal. The artist who clearly had the biggest impact on Magritte, turning him toward fantasy and irrational images, was Giorgio de Chirico. And even then Magritte couldn't find a way to use De Chirico's unique scenography until...
...Leger, the cubo-futurist, also shows signs of the intense energy that characterized futurism. All the events in his painting "Fleur de Tournesol," painted in 1953, radiate with signs of motion. The petals of the flower seem to move towards the edges of the painting...
...Although Leger is a contemporary of the famous Jackson Pollack, who transfers nature onto the canvas through the spontaneous splash of paint, he utilizes a more controlled approach. Leger transforms nature, in this case, the flower, onto the canvas by means of dynamic contour manipulation...
...Metropolis" does not pretend to cover every kind of image made by artists and craftsmen in the '20s. Its focus is the city, and that alone -- so that although it includes Fernand Leger's The Mechanic, 1920, the arcadian strains in '20s French painting, Matisse and Derain, for example, find no place in it. And quite a lot of lesser art does because -- derivative or coarse though it sometimes is -- it has something to say about the pervasiveness of imagery. Much of Weimar-period German art is a crude mix of De Chirico and cartooning, but one doesn't object...
...began to paint in the primitive spirit," he wrote later. The bulky twisting serfs in Floor Polishers, 1911-12, are the laboring cousins of the ecstatic figures in Matisse's La Danse, 1909, and the red-hot metallic forms of The Woodcutter, 1912, are a Tolstoyan version of Leger's "tubism." Aviator, 1914, plays with the standard emblems of Cubism -- printed words, a hat, an ace of clubs. But it has to be the only Cubist painting with a sturgeon...