Fernand Léger. Life in the flesh.

Throughout his career, Fernand Léger (1881-1955) never ceased to proclaim life, to reveal its beauties and to dedicate the best of his art to it. This mission that the artist assigned to his practice is deployed in a frank use of color and forms – as vivid as they are contrasting –, but also through the subjects of the works themselves, which Léger primarily chooses in the context of everyday existence.
Thus, the urban environment became, from the very beginning, the playground for his formal explorations. Paris inspired many of his Cubist works, and he admired the plastic power of New York City. In the labor of the workers, the machines, and the scaffolding, Léger glimpsed the emergence of a new world, a modernity under construction. Finally, leisure time, which saw significant progress with the generalization of paid vacations in 1936, gave rise to virtuoso paintings in which divers, cyclists, and bathers flourished.
The displayed frontality of the painted figures, the direct face-to-face contact with the objects, the artist's resolute decision to keep his subjects at a distance do not conceal his real propensity to seize the things of life, to grasp them, to take them in hand.