Museum Exhibition Catalogues, Monographs, Artist's Projects, Curatorial Writings and Essays
"Those four years [on the battlefield during World War I] threw me suddenly into a blinding reality that was entirely new to me. Paris was in a period of pictorial liberation and I was up to my ears in abstraction when I left. Suddenly I found myself on an equal footing with the whole French people… It came as a total revelation to me, both as a man and a painter… [I] felt the body of metal in my hands, and allowed my eye to stroll in and around the geometry of its sections. It was in the trenches that I really seized the reality of objects." Excerpted from Fernand Léger.
Published alongside the exhibition at the Fundación Canal in Madrid, The Search for a New Order traces the artistic evolution of Fernand Léger (1881–1955), adopting an underutilized lens: the artist’s print series and works for publications. Frequently employing lithographs as his medium of choice, Léger contributed illustrations to accompany others’ text—be it essays, poems or stories—and also produced his own series of thematic images. This volume centers on three of his illustration projects: Cubisme (1912–47), a manifesto penned by Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger; Les Illuminations (1949), the famous collection by Arthur Rimbaud; and Cirque (1950), an independently executed ode to the circus. Viewed together, these series patently convey the variations within Léger’s artistic vocabulary as he endeavored to distill the spirit of the early to mid-20th century.
Published by The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Text by Carolyn Lanchner.
Fernand Léger (1881-1955) is famed for his mechanical-tubular Cubism of the 1920s and for the Futurist-inspired film Ballet Mécanique, his collaboration with composer George Antheil. Léger incorporated elements from a wide range of modernist artistic movements, including Fauvism, Neoplasticism, Surrealism, Neoclassicism and even Social Realism. This volume includes 35 color images; a commentary by Carolyn Lanchner, a former curator of painting and sculpture at MoMA, accompanies each work, elucidating its significance and its context.
Published by Hatje Cantz. Text by Yve-Alain Bois, Raphaël Bouvier, Christian Derouet, Brigitte Hedel-Samson, Philippe Büttner.
Fernand Léger (1881-1955) is one of the few Modernist artists that can be said to have anticipated both American Abstraction and American Pop, and to have made a deliberate relationship with American culture: He visited the U.S. several times, and during the Second World War, from 1940 to 1945, he lived in exile in New York. In America, Léger found much to admire--above all, a dynamic embrace of industry sympathetic to his own quasi-Futurist love of technological energies. An early critic of Léger described him as more of a "Tubist" than a Cubist, noting the cool metal cylinders that fill his early work. It was through such motifs that the artist approached modern life, viewing industry as a force for the good and its translation into art as a Modern vernacular. "Our pictures are our slang," he optimistically declared towards the end of his stay in New York. During that time, Léger had produced some of his most important works, which found a ready audience in the younger American artists surrounding him. Paris-New York covers the artist's entire oeuvre, from the Cubist-influenced early work to the later, cheerful large-format paintings. Special attention is paid to the American dimension of Léger's oeuvre, and the volume traces his impact on American artists--primarily on Roy Lichtenstein and Ellsworth Kelly, but also on other late twentieth-century artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Al Held, Jasper Johns, James Rosenquist, Frank Stella and Andy Warhol.
Published by The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Edited by Carolyn Lanchner. Essays by Carolyn Lanchner, Jodi Hauptman and Matthew Affron. Introduction by Beth Handler. Foreword by Glenn D. Lowry.
Fernand Lªger is the only major modern artist to choose modernity itself as his subject. From his early series Contrastes de formes of 1913-14--the first fully abstract works to emerge from Cubism--through his paintings of construction workers from the late 1940s and early 1950s, his enduring subject was the pulse and dynamism of everyday life. Lªger saw the 20th century environment as a "state of contrasts," a condition that he translated into art through forceful juxtaposition of shape, color, and line. His attempt to reconcile the formal concerns of artmaking with issues of social responsibility continues to be relevant to the art world of today. Accompanying texts recount Lªger's experience of and interest in America and America's interest in him; explore refractions of Lªger's interests in the work of more recent artists; and discuss Lªger's ambition to make an art reflecting the "new visual state" of modern life. An illustrated chronology tells the story of the artist's life, focusing on his time in America, the plate section is complemented by a series of short essays tracing the formal and thematic developments in his art, and a selected bibliography and detailed exhibition history complete the book.This book was published to accompany the 1998 retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Published by The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Edited by Carolyn Lanchner. Essays by Carolyn Lanchner, Jodi Hauptman and Matthew Affron. Introduction by Beth Handler. Foreword by Glenn D. Lowry.
Fernand Lªger is the only major modern artist to choose modernity itself as his subject. From his early series Contrastes de formes of 1913-14--the first fully abstract works to emerge from Cubism--through his paintings of construction workers from the late 1940s and early 1950s, his enduring subject was the pulse and dynamism of everyday life. Lªger saw the 20th century environment as a "state of contrasts," a condition that he translated into art through forceful juxtaposition of shape, color, and line. His attempt to reconcile the formal concerns of artmaking with issues of social responsibility continues to be relevant to the art world of today. Accompanying texts recount Lªger's experience of and interest in America and America's interest in him; explore refractions of Lªger's interests in the work of more recent artists; and discuss Lªger's ambition to make an art reflecting the "new visual state" of modern life. An illustrated chronology tells the story of the artist's life, focusing on his time in America, the plate section is complemented by a series of short essays tracing the formal and thematic developments in his art, and a selected bibliography and detailed exhibition history complete the book.This book was published to accompany the 1998 retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Fernand Léger
Fernand Léger: Paris-New York
Fernand Léger
Fernand Léger