Exuberant World

It is a common thing to say about the late Fernand Leger that he was the artist of the machine age-but he was not entirely a man of his time. He knew poverty as a child, was gassed in World War I, had to flee before the invading Nazis in World War II. But there is little of death or destruction in his work, and if he ever knew despair, he never showed it. Leger so reveled in form and color that it was as if he had lived in a world without a single shadow or a moment of gloom. Other men have painted with more passion, few with more exuberance.

Manhattan's Guggenheim Museum last week put up a large and dazzling Leger show revolving around five major paintings--The Divers, The Country Outing, The Builders, The Cyclists and The Grand Parade--each of which is the climax of scores of paintings and sketches on the same theme. These themes preoccupied Leger for more than ten years before his death, at 74, in 1955. The climactic paintings (he called them "etats definitijs") are among his finest, and at least one, Grand Parade, may be his masterpiece.

Up from Architecture. Leger's artistic beginnings were in architecture; he was apprenticed at 16 to an architect in Caen, and he went on to serve in the office of another architect in Paris before he embarked on a painting career of his own. He passed through a brief phase of impressionism, but rejected it as belonging to a "naturally melodious" era gone by.

He fell under the spell of Cezanne, later said that it took him all of three years to shake it. Some of his early canvases look vaguely like the work of Braque or Gris, but Leger was never to be a cubist. What interested him was not dissection but construction; while the cubists shattered the surface of reality and the surrealists explored the world of dreams, Leger clung to the familiar objects and figures all about him, using them like brightly colored blocks to build his compositions.

Leger saw his fill of suffering in World War I, but the image he carried away with him was the dazzling light of a breechblock gleaming in the sun. When he visited the U.S. some years later, he found beauty not in the lofty mountains or endless plains but in the hectic pace of the cities and their neon gaudiness. He painted the human figure, but said that for him "the human figure has no more importance than keys or bicycles. These are for me objects of plastic value to be used as I wished." He could consciously ignore the rules of perspective: in almost all his paintings, everything happens on the surface. But if his paintings are often flat, they are never dead. Leger's bold shapes and bright colors, carefully chosen for contrast, are kept in constant motion.

Man in Space. In Divers, Leger wanted to show the human body "revolving in space without any point of contact with the ground.'' After innumerable studies of figures, single or in pairs, and a few studies of abstract shapes, entwined like dancers, he produced a climactic picture (see color). It is a jigsaw of figures tumbling, hurtling, plummeting, yet all interlocked. As the eye examines them, they seem to begin to whirl, as if Leger had painted them on a pinwheel.

In Grand Parade, as in so many of his canvases, Leger wrenched the color free, and instead of confining it to the contours of his figures, he spread it on in great joyous swatches. It was his great desire to "liberate pure color in space," but in doing so he also liberated his enormous gift for laughter. No circus scene was ever livelier than this: Leger had all the colored spotlights on, and every performer doing his act. The artist of the machine age was, after all, profoundly in love with the human race.

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