Starting out as a draughtsman in an architecture firm, Fernand Léger was admitted to Paris’ School of Decorative Arts in 1903. Influenced by neo-impressionism, fauvism and then cubism, he finally went his own way and created a visual vocabulary of his own, through which he hoped to achieve “a balance between lines, shapes and colours”. His monumental, realist style occasionally comes very close to abstraction. Whatever the case, his subjects were always drawn from his shrewd observation of the world around him. As Léger's work matured in the 1920s and '30s, he increasingly incorporated elements of modernism—particularly representations of machinery and human figures expressing speed and movement. He died on August 17, 1955, in Gif-sur-Yvette, France.
Starting out as a draughtsman in an architecture firm, Fernand Léger was admitted to Paris’ School of Decorative Arts in 1903. Influenced by neo-impressionism, fauvism and then cubism, he finally went his own way and created a visual vocabulary of his own, through which he hoped to achieve “a balance between lines, shapes and colours”. His monumental, realist style occasionally comes very close to abstraction. Whatever the case, his subjects were always drawn from his shrewd observation of the world around him. As Léger's work matured in the 1920s and '30s, he increasingly incorporated elements of modernism—particularly representations of machinery and human figures expressing speed and movement. He died on August 17, 1955, in Gif-sur-Yvette, France.
