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Biography
French artist, one of the century's most important art theoreticians and moralists. His art training was classical. From the end of the World War I in which he served, his obsession was with the aesthetics of the Machine Age, celebrating the rise of our century's technology, through his use of fragmented planes, of contrasts and ruptures in shape and color. He set out to imagine the city as a machine-this produced some of his masterpieces, such as the enormous The City, 1919, or the yet more abstract The Typographer, 1918. Léger had a way of adopting elements from Fauvism and Orphism to Cubism and even Surrealism, while staying independent of them." Léger observed "When one crosses a landscape by automobile or express train, it becomes fragmented; it loses its descriptive value but gains in synthetic value. The view through the door of the railroad car or the automobile windshield, in combination with the speed, has altered the habitual look of things. A modern man registers a hundred times more sensory impressions than an eighteenth-century artist." He spent the Second World War in exile in America, teaching at the Yale University with Millaud, Focillon, Maurois. Through Matisse he met several artists also in exile: Masson, Tanguy, Matta, Breton, Zadkine, Ernst, Chagall, Mondrian, Ozenfant. He was fascinated by the color glow of neons. Léger enjoyed considerable fame in his lifetime." Leger's monumental paintings of construction workers on high steel are directly derived from New York. Nevertheless, the tone of the big late work is distinctly French, not American. It becomes so by its mixture of social convictions with a high-art classical tradition.
Exhibitions
Grande Escala - Colecção Berardo Centro das Artes Casa das Mudas, Calheta, Madeira, Portugal 09-10-2004 ~ 18-03-2005
Erich Kahn - Forgotten Generation Jewish Survivor German Expressionist Sintra Museu de Arte Moderna - Colecção Berardo (SMAM-CB), Portugal 05-05-2005 ~ 09-10-2005
Territórios Singulares na Colecção Berardo Sintra Museu de Arte Moderna - Colecção Berardo (SMAM-CB), Portugal 22-10-2002 ~ 28-02-2003
Para o cego (....) Culturgest Fundação Caixa Geral de Depósitos, Portugal 28-05-2010 ~ 29-08-2010
Paradise Motel Museu Colecção Berardo, Portugal 13-11-2010 ~ 26-12-2011
Bibliography
Christie's, Twentieth Century Art, 2000 Published by Christie's
Domus, 1953
Erich Kahn - Forgotten Generation Jewish Survivor German Expressionist , 2005 Published by Sintra Museu de Arte Moderna - Colecção Berardo ISBN 9729903018
Grande Escala - The Berardo Collection, 2004 Published by Centro das Artes - Casa das Mudas ISBN 972890200X
Léger and Composition 1953, 1953 Published by MoMA – Museum of Modern Art
Territórios Singulares na Colecção Berardo, 2002 Published by Sintra Museu de Arte Moderna - Colecção Berardo ISBN 972974288X
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