The landscapes of Fernand Léger
After the exhibition "Léger and the cinema", the works return to the picture rails of the Fernand Léger National Museum! Paintings, drawings, ceramics and tapestries are presented until February 27, 2023 according to a thematic and original hanging, centered on the landscape in the work of Fernand Léger (1881-1955).
In the 1900s, the first paintings by Fernand Léger were marked by a strong influence of impressionist painting. The young painter sees in this movement, born in reaction to a strictly codified academic painting, a first attempt to free form and color. For Léger, this is a powerful aesthetic revolution because, for the first time, painting escapes its purely illusionist function: “The Impressionists are the great innovators of the current movement […]. Wanting to free itself from the imitative side [...], the trees, the houses merge and are closely linked, enveloped in a colorful dynamism”
From his beginnings, Fernand Léger upset and questioned the traditional genres of painting. He never ceases to practice the landscape with which he develops an ambivalent relationship, between the heritage of the pictorial tradition and the quest for modernity. Léger liberates the landscape from its classical definition: he strives to renew it by introducing fragments of modernity-urban or industrial signals-observed in its immediate environment.
Thanks to games of abstract shapes, solid colors or the use of typographic signs, he reflects the growing industrialization of the French countryside but also the geometry of American cities. Alongside his fascination with the emergence of the modern city, Léger remains attached to natural elements and the representation of a certain rurality.
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In his art history lectures, Fabrice Roy combines the past with the present, in a poetic and playful evocation of the French 19th century...
