Word: legere
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...Calder that got the young American full entry to the Parisian art world. This charming piece of performance art was one of the small sights of Paris between 1926 and 1930; it was seen and enjoyed by a whole roster of artists, designers and architects--Joan Miro and Fernand Leger, Le Corbusier and Isamu Noguchi and, most important for the eventual direction of Calder's own work, Piet Mondrian...
...Fernand Leger (1881-1955) is the only one of the great early 20th century French Modernists who hasn't had a major museum show in America in nearly half a century. Picasso, Braque, Matisse, Duchamp and others, yes; but not Leger--a fact that is doubly odd, since no French painter, indeed, no French cultural figure of any kind, was more fascinated and stimulated by American culture, or did more to make a bridge between Paris and New York. Now, with an excellent and tightly focused show at Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art, this has happily changed. Curated...
...work is not Cubist at all, if Cubism means fragmentation. It was massively built and integrated, and it buried all traces of its construction process. But it could also be very surprising, and in its insistent reduction of the human form to mechanics, extremely weird--particularly when Leger's obsession with modernity coexisted with a sense of form and construction that went straight back to those archetypal figures of French classicism, Nicolas Poussin in the 17th century and Jacques-Louis David in the 18th. And what a draftsman Leger turns out to have been! Some of the drawings in this...
...also thinks of Leger finding a typical style early and sticking to it. But this, as the show reveals, is not altogether true. He was a consistent artist but a very eclectic one as well, and one of the things that endears him to the Postmodernist temper is the way that traces of practically all the early 20th century movements, from Fauvism and Orphism to Cubism and even Surrealism, turn up in his work--not as a mishmash of quotes but as integrated elements. There's even a bow to Dada in a peculiar picture from 1930 in which...
...middle age Leger looked like a big Norman ox, square-headed, strong-nosed, an homme du peuple. And indeed his father was, by trade, a cattle breeder. But the son studied architecture, and this began a lifetime's fascination with structure. His art training was, in fact, classical. His main teacher was Jean-Leon Gerome, academic par excellence, and it's not much of a stretch to suppose that the Geromes and Bouguereaus he saw, with their pale, continuously rounded flesh (tubular, in a way) and their meticulous highlights, influenced the "Tubism" of his maturing style. The manikins...