Monday, Jun. 22, 1953

Machine-Age Primitive

THE Paris school of painting boasts five aged masters who probably have less in common than the members of any other "school" in art history. They are protean Pablo Picasso, bubbly Henri Matisse, smoldering Georges Rouault, sherbet-cool Georges Braque--and the least famous of the lot, Fernand Leger. The U.S. is getting to know Leger better this year, through a retrospective exhibition of his work arranged by Chicago's Art Institute. Last week, after a six-week stay in Chicago, the 125-item show opened at the San Francisco Museum of Art. Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art will have it in the fall.

The show makes plain the fact that for a man of his high standing Leger is notably primitive. The most recent oil in the exhibition is a hard, startling arabesque called The Builders (opposite). Painter Leger, 72, who finished the picture in 1950, says that in it he "tried to achieve the most violent contrasts by opposing minutely realistic human figures with clouds and metallic structures." If the workers, perched on their unfinished skyscraper, are far from "minutely realistic," they do look surprisingly human--for Leger. The tough old man, who has spent a lifetime painting pictures as empty of sentiment as pie plates, may be mellowing a trifle.

Leger's avowed purpose has always been to make pictures that are bold and cold enough to rival a locomotive or a neon sign for attention. In painting human figures, he habitually reduces them to automatons, explaining that they are no more important to the artist's eye than other, neater objects, such as, for example, drainpipes. Neither the rich shadows of Renaissance painting nor the dazzling highlights of Impressionism intrigue Leger; he sticks to bright, flat, posterlike hues. He never sings the glory of dappled things, nor does he praise anything soft, warm, delicate or liquid. Under Leger's firm brush, foliage, flesh, hair, fabrics, clouds and the very air itself take on an appearance of stamped, enameled tin.

Leger's strength lies in his limitations. Raised on a Norman farm, he has never quite got over the awe and delight with which the country boy sees the big city for the first time, although Paris is now home to him. Leger's bias for machine-tooled design does not come from study, experiment or theory; it was set during the only period in his adult life when he did no painting, while he was a stretcher-bearer in an engineer corps during World War I. "There," he recalls, "in the midst of machines, I felt my taste for the mechanical and dynamic side of modern life grow . . . I said, and I still think, that to see a howitzer shell shining in the sun is worth more than all visits to museums."

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