Volume 45, Number 8 · May 14, 1998
Simply Himself
By John Golding
Fernand Léger Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, May 29-September 29, 1997; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, October 28, 1997-January 12, 1998; Museum of Modern Art, New York, February 15-May 12, 1998.
a retrospective exhibition at the Musée National d'Art Moderne,, Catalog of the New York exhibition by Carolyn Lanchner, with Jodi Hauptman, by Matthew Affron
Museum of Modern Art/Abrams, 304 pp., $29.95 (paper)
Léger's true originality lay in his instinctive conviction that he could fashion any aesthetic tendency he encountered to suit the ongoing demands of his own art. In this he was on the whole astonishingly successful. He was born in rural Normandy in 1881 (the same year as Picasso). His earliest surviving canvasses, painted after he studied in Paris, show him working in a somewhat debased Impressionist fashion. Next, he responded briefly to Fauvism before succumbing to Cézanne, whom he initially reinterpreted in a reductive, even somewhat brutal manner. Cubism came to him as a revelation and he always saw himself as being one of the initiators of the movement. Because of his artistic stature, writers and above all exhibition organizers have tended to accept him as such. This has worked to his disadvantage. Picasso confided to Françoise Gilot that he, Braque, and Gris, the 'Three Musketeers of Cubism,' saw Léger as being simply himself.
Review, 8303 words
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