Fernand Leger – La Colombe

Description

Fernand Leger La Colombe (The Dove) 1951 26 x 20 in., is a colored lithograph on Arches Paper. This Print was published by Louise Leiris, Paris and printed by Fernand Mourlot, Paris. This print is signed and numbered from the edition of 75. Saphire 115.

Regarded as the forerunner of the up and coming Pop Art style, Fernand Leger was a French painter, sculptor and filmmaker, working in his own form of cubism, modified into a figurative style. He originally trained as an architect, and worked as an architectural draftsman in Paris in 1900. By 1903, after a brief stint in the Versailles military service, Leger enrolled at the School of Decorative Arts in Paris, and later applied to the School of Fine Arts, where he was rejected. Nevertheless, he attended art classes as an unenrolled student, and began working seriously as an artist at the age of 25.

Influenced by the chaos of urban spaces and his interest in brilliant, primary color, Léger sought to express the noise, dynamism, and speed of new technology and machinery often creating a sense of movement in his paintings that captured the optimism of the pre-World War I period.

Léger founded the Académie de l’Art Moderne at his studio in 1924 with fellow French Cubist painter Amédée Ozenfant (1886–1966). The Académie lasted until 1939, and during this time he developed Tubism—a style in which human body parts and architectural elements are rendered with three-dimensional shading to look like voluminous tubes and cylinders. Also in 1924, he completed his first film, Ballet Mécanique. Léger relocated to New York to escape World War II, and taught a lecture series at Yale which many artists attended, influencing New York School painters. Léger returned to France in 1946, where he became intensely-involved with the Communist Party. In the 1950s, the series paintings Builders, Campers, and The Big Parade illustrated a concern for the common man, inspired by Léger’s view of electrical workers atop poles. In his effort to have his works seen by the common man he temporarily installed several of the Builders paintings in the canteen at the Renault factory near Paris, where they met mixed reactions. He continued to travel and produce works in various media until his death in 1955.