Fernand Leger
Came back from the trenches convinced that painting should look like machinery, and made it.
Fernand Leger was born in Normandy in 1881, trained as an architectural draughtsman, and was making his own version of Cubism — tubular, mechanical, which critics called Tubism — before 1914. Four years at the front, much of it at Verdun, confirmed rather than broke the direction: he said the breech of a seventy-five millimetre gun in sunlight taught him more than any museum. The post-war work is an art of workers, cyclists, builders and machine parts in flat primary colour and heavy black contour, extended into murals, ceramics, stained glass and the film Ballet Mecanique. He died in 1955.
The mechanical period from 1918 to the mid-1920s leads the market. Leger is extensively forged, and the Bauquier catalogue raisonne and the Musee National Fernand Leger at Biot are the references. He produced a large body of gouaches and drawings, many of them studies for known compositions, and these require particular care in attribution. The printed output — lithographs, pochoirs and illustrated books, including Cirque — is substantial, and posthumous editions printed after 1955 circulate widely and should be distinguished from lifetime impressions.
If you own a work by Fernand Leger
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