Fernand Leger – Le Cirque (The Circus)

Description

Fernand Leger, Le Cirque (The Circus) c.1950 is an original color lithograph print from the hand signed and numbered edition of 285. This print is after a gouache painting by the artist. Signed by Fernand Leger in pen lower right, and numbered lower left.

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.

In 1909, he moved to Montparnasse, France, and met such leaders of the avant-garde movement as Lipchitz and Chagall, and later formed the Section D’Or, a group of avant-garde artists, who eventually produced the Salon des Independants. As a lover of the cinema, Leger contemplated leaving painting in order to pursue filmmaking. Along with various movie set deigns, he directed and produced an independent film, “Ballet Mecanique,” in 1924. In that same year, he established a free art school, where he taught many renowned artists. Not just a painter, his prolific works include set designs, book illustrations, murals, stained glass windows, mosaics, and ceramic sculptures. In 1931, he was invited to the United States to decorate the apartment of Nelson Rockefeller in New York City, where he fell in love with the harsh city landscape.

The first painter to make the products of the consumer age a formative influence on his paintings, he is considered the father of modern Pop Art, and his paintings have sold for as much as $22 million.