Léger

This interdisciplinary exhibition will shed new light on the vitally experimental decade of the 1920s in Paris when the great French modernist Fernand Léger (1881-1955) played a leading role in redefining the practice of painting by bringing it into active engagement with the urban environment and modern mass media. This will be the first exhibition to take as its inspiration and focus Léger's monumental painting The City (1919), a cornerstone of the Philadelphia Museum of Art's collection and a landmark in the history of modern art, placing it in dialogue with the urban art and culture of modernity.

Gallery Tour

The exhibition will present a core group of Léger's exceptional paintings on the theme of the city, along with film projections, theater designs, architectural models, and print and advertising designs by the artist and his contemporaries. In a multi-media installation of more than 120 works, including loans from American and European public and private collections, this exhibition will demonstrate the varied strategies through which artists and designers of the European avant-garde, with Léger in the lead, sought to participate in the complexity and excitement of the metropolis. The exhibition will also feature work by Cassandre, Robert and Sonia Delaunay, Theo van Doesburg, Alexandra Exter, Abel Gance, Le Corbusier, Piet Mondrian, Gerald Murphy, Francis Picabia, Man Ray, and many others.

Chronology

• 1881
  • Born in Argentan in northwestern France
• 1897
  • Serves as apprentice to an architect in Caen, France
• 1900 - 1911
  • Moves to Paris and works as architectural draftsman
  • Takes a studio at La Ruche (French for "the beehive"), an art-studio complex in Paris, where he befriends artists such as Robert Delaunay and Jacques Lipchitz, and the writer Blaise Cendrars (1909)
  • Moves to a studio in another part of Paris, where he paints Smoke over Rooftops (1911)
• 1914
  • Serves in World War I in France
• 1919, Paris
  • Paints The City
  • Illustrates The End of the World (La fin du monde), a book written by Blaise Cendrars
• 1921 - 1923, Paris
  • Designs curtains, stage sets, and costumes for Skating Rink, a production by Ballet suédois (1921)
  • Designs sets and costumes for Creation of the World for Ballet suédois (1921)
  • Paints The Large Tugboat (1923)
  • Collaborates with other artists to produce his only film, Mechanical Ballet (Ballet mécanique) (1923)
• 1924, Venice, Paris
  • Visits several cities in Italy, including Venice, with his art dealer; paints Animated Landscape after returning to France
  • Starts an art school in Paris with several other artists
• 1931
  • Makes first trip to the United States
• 1935
  • Makes second trip to the United States
• 1938
  • Makes third trip to the United States; creates studies for cinematic mural to be installed in the lobby of Radio City Music Hall in midtown Manhattan
• 1940
  • Lives in New York City during World War II
• 1945
  • Works and resides in France
• 1955
  • Dies in Gif-sur-Yvette, France
• 1960
  • Musée National Fernand Léger opens in Biot, France