Art, People, and Color in the Musée national Fernand Léger
Weixin Zhou
A thesis submitted to the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in the Department of Art and Art
History in the College of Arts and Sciences.
Chapel Hill 2019
ã 2019 Weixin Zhou
ABSTRACT
Weixin Zhou: Art, People, and Color in the Musée national Fernand Léger (Under the direction of Daniel J. Sherman)
The Musée national Fernand Léger at Biot was commissioned in 1957 by Léger’s widow Nadia Léger and his associate Georges Bauquier to honor the artist’s accomplishments and to realize his dream of bringing art to the people. The museum, as revealed by its architectural decorations, was imbued with multiple and even contrasting narratives: it echoed Léger’s call for democratizing art on the one hand, and on the other hand, it served the privileged class. The decorative program, executed based on Léger’s late works and unrealized designs, incorporated the artist’s ideas about art in relation to the people, and his critique of the cultural condition in France after World War II. As an extension of Léger’s oeuvre, the decorative program also manifested Léger’s search for a new pictorial language both from and for the people.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
TABLE OF CONTENTS
LIST OF FIGURES...vi
INTRODUCTION...1
CHAPTER 1: ART AND THE PEOPLE...9
Machine, Nature, and Human...11
Art for the People...14
CHAPTER 2: COLOR AND WALL...20
“Un Nouveau Réalisme” ...22
“The Wall, The Architect, The Painter” ...26
CHAPTER 3: WALKING IN THE RIVIERA AND BEYOND...32
The Flower as An Intermediary...34
The Flower as Alienation...40
CONCLUSION...45
FIGURES...47
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 1 – South elevation of the Musée national Fernand Léger, Biot, 1958-1960………47
Figure 2 – Fernand Léger, model for the entrance to the cycle racetrack of Hannover, ca. 1955……….47
Figure 3 – Fernand Léger, Les Loisirs, Hommage à David, 1948-49...……...48
Figure 4 – Fernand Léger, La Grande Julie, 1945………...49
Figure 5 – Fernand Léger, La Partie de Campaign (état définitif), 1954………...50
Figure 6 – Fernand Léger, Le Campeur (1er état), 1954………...51
Figure 7 – Fernand Léger, La Salle de la Culture Physique, 1935...52
Figure 8 – Fernand Lé ger and Charlotte Perriand, Joies essentielles, plaisirs nouveaux, fresco for the Agricultural Pavilion, Paris World’s Fair, 1937...52
Figure 9 – Fernand Léger, La Grande Parade (état définitif), 1954...53
Figure 10 – Mosaic panels on the east façade of the Musée national Fernand Léger, Biot...54
Figure 11 – Partial view of the west façade of the Musée national Fernand Léger, Biot...54
Figure 12 – Fernand Léger, Project de peinture mural pourLa Triennale de Milan, 1951...55
Figure 13 – Partial view of the stained glass on the west façade, Musée national Fernand Léger, Biot...55
Figure 14 – View of the entrance hall, Musée national Fernand Léger, Biot...56
Figure 15 – Mural paintings in the General Assembly Hall of the United Nations Headquarters in New York, executed by Bruce Gregory, 1952...57
Figure 16 – Fernand Léger, Nature morte aux fruits sur fond bleu, 1939...58
Figure 17 – Mosaic Litanies of the Virgin on the façade of the church of Notre-Dame-de-Toute-Grâce, Assy, Haute-Savoie, 1947-1948...59
Figure 18 – Le jardin d’enfants, Musée national Fernand Léger, Biot, executed by Roland Brice, 1960………60
INTRODUCTION
In 1955, shortly before his death, Fernand Léger bought a villa at the foot of the rural village of Biot in the French Riviera. Biot was famous for its pottery production. Léger’s initial plan was to house his ceramic studio in the villa. After his sudden death, his widow, Nadia Léger, in collaboration with his associate Georges Bauquier, built a museum on the hill close to the village to honor Léger and to house his works.1 The museum, the first single-artist museum
and the first modern art museum in the region, opened in May 1960. Between 1967 and 1969, Nadia and Bauquier donated the museum to the French state,2 along with a rich collection of
more than three hundred works that demonstrated Léger’s contributions to the art of the twentieth century.3 André Malraux, Minister for Cultural Affairs, received the key of the
1 Nadia and Bauquier’s vision of the museum was grounded in the value of a rich collection of Léger’s
works covering the full extent of his career. The works represented “a moment of the culture of mankind” and “an expression of the twentieth-century French art.” See Georges Bauquier, Fernand Léger, Vivre dans le vrai (Paris: Adrien Maeght Éditeur, 1987), 353.
2 In 1952, Nadia Khodossevitch married Fernand Léger, and took the name Nadia Léger. After Léger’s
death, she married Georges Bauquier, and she was sometimes called Nadia Léger-Bauquier. In this thesis, I refer her as Nadia.
3 I reference three sources on the chronology of the museum, and they are the website of the National
Museums in Alpes-Maritimes, the official visitor’s guide of the museum and a news report on Malraux’s visit to the museum in 1969. Both the news report and the visitor’s guide mention that the nationalization happened seven years after its inauguration in 1960, while the website states that the nationalization was in 1969. But Malraux’s official visit to the museum in 1969 symbolically marked its nationalization, and had political significance. See Alexandre Boza, “André Malraux et Nadia Léger au musée Fernand Léger de Biot,” INA Jalons, February 4, 1969, https://fresques.ina.fr/jalons/fiche-media/InaEdu05340/andre-malraux-et-nadia-leger-au-musee-fernand-leger-de-biot.html. See also “Fernand Léger, au-delà du décor, le roman d’une façade,” Musées Nationaux Alpes-Maritimes, accessed December 8, 2018,
museum from Nadia in his official trip to Biot in 1969, which marked the official nationalization of the museum. The museum was renamed Musée national Fernand Léger.4
In the preface to the visitor’s guide of the museum, Maurice Fréchuret, head curator and director of the National Museums of the Twentieth Century in Alpes-Maritimes, states that “the new museum,” open in 1960 and nationalized a few years later, was “in phase with the generous ideas of this artist who so wanted to give people access to culture in general, and to the art of their times in particular.”5 The statement emphasizes public accessibility as its mission, and the
use of past tense (“was”) implies that the museum had envisioned itself as a museum to democratize art and culture. Léger’s role was also unique in constructing the vision of the
museum. The Léger museum, as mentioned by Fréchuret, valued and evoked Léger’s ideas about art and museums as cultural institutions in service to the people. Léger’s concern about the low public accessibility to art especially among the working class was reflected in his critique of the traditional museums and conditions of the post-war French culture.
Starting from Léger’s life-long goal of bringing art to les classes populaires (the working class), this thesis is a study of the Musée national Fernand Léger as an embodiment of Léger’s late works and legacy, and the afterlife of his works, the aspects that have not been fully studied. These topics can be approached by examining different aspects of the museum, for example, the display of the collection or the exhibition programs. I, however, base my analysis on the most visible component of the museum – the decorations. I see the decorative program as an extension of Léger’s oeuvre and an expression of his theories, offering a privileged perspective on his works and theories.
4 In this thesis, I sometimes refer the Musée national Fernand Léger as the Léger museum.
5 “The new museum” probably referred to the re-opening of the museum with a new layout in 2008.
Léger’s “sense of loyalty to the people, to the common man”was formed in the Great War and further developed in the Front Populaire (Popular Front).6 When the Popular Front that
united French intellectuals on the left came to power in 1936, a series of social and cultural reforms were enacted. Culturally, the Maison de la Culture gathered the intellectuals and artists of Association des Écrivains et Artistes Révolutionnaires (A.E.A.R) such as Louis Aragon, the painters Amédée Ozenfant and Paul Signac, and among the writers, Romain Roland and André Malraux. Léger actively participated in the initiative of the A.E.A.R. which was to create and to transmit art to the industrial and rural masses in France – to give art back to the people.7 Andrew
McClellan argues that although the princely collection had been transitioned to public museums in the nineteenth century, the “new public” was limited to those who had the wealth and
education to be aesthetically and intellectually capable of understanding works of art.8 Theorists
and artists of the A.E.A.R. aimed to extend the public of museums to the working class by organizing workshops and guided tours. Léger recalled in 1946 that the group urged Georges Huisman, director of the Beaux-Arts, to open the museums in the evening so that workers could visit after their work.9 To Léger, however, museums still remained exclusive to the elite even
after World War II. He wrote in 1945, the year that he joined the Parti Communiste Français (P.C.F.), newly re-established and enjoying the prestige of its Resistance record, “it is
6 Edward F. Fry, Introduction to Functions of Painting, xx.
7 This was not the only goal of the A.E.A.R. They also attempted to extend the French art and culture to
the colonial working class, and to establish a contact with the artists in Soviet Union. Cited in Matthew Affron, “Fernand Léger and The Spectacle of Objects,” (PhD dissertation, Yale University, 1994), 201. See also Sarah Wilson, ‘“La Beauté Révolutionnaire”? Réalisme Socialiste and French Painting 1935-1954,’ Oxford Art Journal 3, no.2 (1980), 61.
8 Andrew McClellan, The Art Museum from Boullée to Bilbao (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2008), 155-158.
9 Fernand Léger, “Art and the People,” in Functions of Painting, ed. Edward F. Fry and trans. Alexandra
inexcusable that after five years of war, […] men who have been heroic actors in this sad epic should not have their rightful turn in the sanctuaries.”10
The era after World War II marked the decline of France’s artistic and political status. Philip Nord sees post-war France as economically and culturally “beleaguered” by the United States.11 When Malraux took office in 1959, he noted that the conditions of the existing cultural
institutions were disastrous, and French modern art was still a “prewar memory.”12 One of
Malraux’s goals was to bring French cultural heritage to the general public, and he led an active cultural policy marked by numerous inaugurations of public cultural institutions.13 After being
nationalized, the Léger museum, along with the artist’s works, became a state cultural asset that reflected and participated in the division between the discourse of the post-war cultural policy developed by Malraux, and Pierre Bourdieu’s policy critique in the 1960s.14 I argue that the
Musée national Fernand Léger helped to the transmission of art to a wider public, but at the same time did not fully subvert the exclusivity of art and culture to benefit the elite. The Léger
museum, as revealed through its decorations, echoes Léger’s call for democratizing art but at the same time contradicts it.
The original building of the Léger museum, which is now the south elevation, was erected between 1957 and 1960, and was expanded with a new north wing in 1987. The basic
10 Léger, “The Human Body,” in Functions of Painting, 135.
11 Philip Nord, France’s New Deal: From Thirties to the Postwar Era (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton
University Press, 2010), 7.
12 Cited in Herman Lebovics, Mona Lisa’s Escort: André Malraux and the Reinvention of French Culture
(Ithaca and London: Cornell University, 1999), 5.
13 Boza, “André Malraux et Nadia Léger au musée Fernand Léger de Biot.”
14 Malraux’s cultural policy and Bourdieu’s policy critique are, as described by Philippe Urfalino, “the
and functional structure of the architecture, echoed by the simple gallery space inside, contrasts with polychromatic and monumental decorations on the façades. The decorations, including the sculptures in the garden, were considered and designed to be part of the architecture, “un project décoratif intégré dans l’architecture du musée.”15 The decorative program includes three mosaic
projects on the south elevation and the west and east façades; the stained glass in the entrance hall; and two sculptural works in the garden of the museum. The decorative program was
mapped out by Nadia and Bauquier, and all the works were executed based on Léger’s paintings and original designs, most of which were his last and unfinished works. The installation of the decorative program was a gradual process with several works added after the nationalization of the museum, and therefore the installation process involved various stakeholders and decision makers – Léger, Nadia, Bauquier and the state – which mirrors the complexity of the narratives constructed around the museum.
Two themes run through this thesis. First, in Léger’s 1945 article The Human Body, after expressing his discontent about museums and the public accessibility to art, he continued, “the ascent of the masses to beautiful works of art, to Beauty, will be the sign of a new time.”16 Léger
envisaged the function of museums as somewhere between art education and appreciation. It recalls, as Daniel J. Sherman and Irit Rogoff observe, the historical dichotomy between art and artifact, which have been traditionally associated with pleasure and instruction respectively.17
This division makes the audience of museums less definitive, and it is not easy for museums to
15 “L’Histoire de la collection,” Musées nationaux alpes maritimes, accessed November 6, 2018.
https://en.musees-nationaux-alpesmaritimes.fr/fleger/node/234.
16 Léger, “The Human Body,” in Functions of Painting, 135.
17 Daniel J. Sherman and Irit Rogoff, “Introduction: Frameworks for Critical Analysis,” in Museum
sustain both functions. Indeed, Léger advocated an art education not confined within museums but extending to schools and public places. Since Léger nonetheless believed that the working class could educate themselves by feeling the beauty of art, he was ambivalent about and even muddled the division between nature – appreciating art out of an intrinsic perception – and culture, that is understanding art through an intellectual process that is grounded in the social experience. The idea of an innate taste among the working class prompted Léger to develop a new mode of artistic expression, and also initiated the decorative program of his museum. But the innate taste might turn out to be illusory, as Bourdieu negated this notion as a controlling myth.18
The second set of themes involve nature, machines, and humanity. They are all
manifested in Léger’s outputs – his writings and visual representations, which then became his iconic pictorial language. In his intellectual exploration and artistic practice, Léger, as Timothy Hyman notes, constantly sought to affirm the harmony between natural and mechanical worlds.19
Writing on Léger’s unique position on machine and human, John Berger discerned that instead of seeing the machine as a symbol of elevation to industries, or as a “new star” to advance aesthetic theories to artists, Léger treated it as a tool in the hands of men.20 Berger’s observation,
echoed by Matthew Affron, applies more clearly to Léger’s works after the1930s, and an
18 Pierre Bourdieu, Alain Darbel and Dominique Schnapper, The Love of Art: European Art Museums and
Their Public, trans. Caroline Beattie and Nick Merriman (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1990), 108-113. See also Vera L. Zolberg, ‘“An Elite Experience for Everyone’: Art Museums, the Public, and Cultural Literacy,” in Museum Culture: Histories, Discourse, Spectacles, ed. Sherman and Rogoff, 55-58.
19 Timothy Hyman, “After Léger,” London Magazine 17, no.6 (1977), 57.
20 John Berger, Selected Essays, ed. Geoff Dyer (New York: Vintage International, 2001), 195-196. In his
imaginary harmony between the natural and mechanical world culminated in his late works such as Les Loisirs, Hommage à David (1948-49, figure 3), La Partie de Campagne (1954, figure 5) and his final large-scale canvas La Grande Parade (1954, figure 9): men and women lived in a balance between machine and nature, work and leisure. This imaginary harmony also pervades the decorations of the museum.
This thesis consists of three chapters. Each chapter focuses on different works from the decorative program, using them to explore the broader themes in Léger’s ideas and practice. The focus of Chapter one is people – Léger’s view of the working class, his vision of people’s life, and his theory of public accessibility to art. I look into the mosaic mural of the south elevation of the museum, completed between 1957 and 1960, with a focus on the two illustrations of human figures, people playing a ball and a cyclist. The figural depictions on this mosaic mural and in other Leger’s late works showed his reminiscence of people’s leisure and pleasure in the Popular Front. He envisioned art as an accompaniment to people’s life and sought a new mode of
expression to fulfill his ambition.
As in Léger’s mind art should serve to people, he attempted to incorporate people’s language, in his terms, “slang”, into his artistic experiment.21 The second chapter investigates
Léger’s new pictorial language, and situates his exploration in the debate, known as La Querelle du réalisme, among the artists and theorists in the circle of A.E.A.R. in the late 1930s. I examine the decorations that were added to the museum after its nationalization and expansion, including the mosaic murals on the new east and west façades. The use of colors and non-figurative forms at a large scale on the walls of the museum building put Léger’s aesthetic theory of color and wall into practice, and also responded to his initiative to democratize art through museums.
21 “Slang” was a key notion that appeared several times in Léger’s writings. See Fernand Léger, “L’art et
CHAPTER 1: ART AND THE PEOPLE
The original building of the Musée national Fernand Léger, which is now the south elevation, was erected between 1957 and 1960. The commission went to a Russian-born French architect, André Svetchine. In collaboration with Svetchine, the landscape architect Henri Fisch designed the garden. The architecture of the museum was simple, and the building was designed as a support to highlight the monumental decoration of its main façade. The façade of the south elevation was decorated with a 400-square-meter mosaic executed by Lino and Heidi Mélano (figure 1). Complemented by two pieces of ceramic reliefs made by Roland Brice’s studio in Biot, the mosaic and ceramic mural was based on Léger’s unexecuted design for the entrance to the city stadium and cycling track in Hannover, a project halted due to his unexpected death in 1955.
ceramic relief on the left illustrates three arms held up and hands reaching for a ball. The ball-game motif was repeated in many of Léger’s late works with a theme of “The Country Outing.”22
Although in the final version of La Partie de Campaign (The Country Outing, 1954, figure 5), Léger removed the motif of a people holding a ball, it often appeared in his earlier studies and in other related works such as Le Campeur (1943-54, figure 6). In the left ceramic panel on the south elevation (figure 1), the shape of hands resembles the contour of trees or hills in the background. Various black and white specks are scattered around. Although they are depicted in a rather abstract form, viewers can still posit that they represent the Sun, clouds, trees, hills or houses, indicating that people are playing sports in the countryside.
The significance of the mosaic project for the south elevation does more than to show the accomplishment of Léger’s late works; the mural embodies Léger’s vision of the people’s life and his theories of art in relation to the people. In order to comprehend Léger’s pictorial
language, his depictions of human figures in particular, in the mosaic and ceramic project for the south elevation, and in his late works, we shall turn to his ideas about art, as well as his works since the 1930s when he started to move away from the aesthetic of mechanical and industrial objects.23
22 The term “The Country Outing” is used to indicate a theme of works created by Léger between 1943
and 1954. This theme includes not only the study for and variations of La Partie de Campaign but also other related works such as Le Boneur and Le Campeurs. Most of the works depict playing and
picnicking in the countryside. See Thomas M. Messer, Fernand Léger: Five Themes and Variations (New York: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1962), 67-79.
23 Matthew Affron, “Léger’s Modernism: Subjects and Objects,” in Fernand Léger (New York: Museum
Machine, Nature, and Human
The ball-game motif appeared as early as 1935 in Léger’s monumental mural for La Salle de la Culture Physique in the French pavilion at the Brussels International Exposition (figure 7). In the lower left of the picture, a ball is floating in the air and almost touched by the hands of athletes. Other figurative motifs include ropes and bars, which in this context represent sports equipment.24 Human figures are depicted in an abstract form as emotionless mannequins, and
remain isolated from the surrounding elements. As seen in Léger’s other works from the same period, stylized arms, mannequins and floating objects in this quasi-Metaphysical painting give a sense of aloofness. The lack of relationship between human figures and other elements precludes “the involvement of spectators.”25 Although Léger had started to show his concerns about art in
relation to les classes populaires considerably earlier, his pictorial language largely focused on “the material quotidian” as its own, and perceived human body as “a discrete object.”26 In 1924,
reflecting on The Machine Aesthetics, Léger wrote, “I consider plastic beauty in general to be completely independent from sentimental, descriptive, and imitative values.”27 The depiction of
mechanical and objectified human figures however gradually vanished from his canvas since the late 1920s, and he became interested in natural objects, and even the mechanical objects turned organic and “hand hewn.”28 This shift, which occurred in the Great Depression, marked Léger’s
24 Karin von Mauer, “Rhythm and the Cult of the Body: Léger and the ideal of a ‘New Man’,” in Fernand
Léger: The Later Years (London: Whitechapel, 1987), 33.
25 Ina Conzen-Meairs, “Revolution and Tradition: The Metamorphosis of the Conception of Realism in
the Late Works of Fernand Léger,” in Fernand Léger: The Later Years, 14.
26 Affron, “Léger’s Modernism: Subjects and Objects”, 132.
27 Léger, “The Machine Aesthetic: The Manufactured Object, the Artisan, and the Artist,” in Functions of
Painting, 52. The article was written in 1924.
attention to the people – peasants who worked in the field, and workers who he considered were the victims of dehumanizing Taylorism, as “the merciless mechanical of time takes away all fantasy, all feelings of adventure from life.”29
If, in the 30s, mechanical products still retained a dominant role in Léger’s visual
expression, his works in the 40s, especially those created after World War II, witnessed a change of focus towards the representation of nature, the people and their inventions which were often in the form of mechanical objects. His canvas paintings and mural works were infused with the representations of leisure activities of the working class and man’s “peaceful exchange with nature.”30 The illustration of the raised arms as in the ceramic panels (figure 1-2) had appeared in
Léger’s “The Country Outing” themed works.31 Clouds, trees and hills in both ceramic panels of
the south elevation and La Partie de Campagne placed a group of people in a natural setting. The aloofness and isolation in the mural for the 1935 Brussels World Fair are not perceptible in La Partie de Campaign and in other late works, in which human figures interact with nature and integrate into the landscapes. No longer as “a discrete object,” members of the working class become the subject, and as the builders construct a physical world and the circus creates a fantasy world, the working class is presented as a collective, in unison and in a harmonious
29 The quote was from Léger’s article published on L’Intransigeant in 1929, and cited by Romy Golan.
Golan also observes that in his letters to Simone Herman around that time, peasantry and nature were recurrent themes. See Romy Golan, Modernity and Nostalgia: Art and Politics in France between the Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955), 69.
30 Ina Conzen-Meairs, “Revolution and Tradition,” 14.
31 Fernand Léger: Five Themes and Variations gives a comprehensive view of Léger’s study. In La Partie
world filled with natural landscape and mechanical objects. Léger’s concern shifted from “the means of production” to, as John Berger remarks, “productive relations.”32
After the “machine aesthetics” of his purist period, in the 1940s Léger’s depictions of the people attempted to “give a voice” to workers.33 But unlike the representation of the toiling
masses advocated by the Popular Front and the P.C.F., Léger’s works lacked a strong political statement as seen in the work of other Communist painters like André Fougeron. Fougeron’s portrayal of women in Parisiennes au Marché and the representation of the figures in tricolore in Hommage à André Houiller responded to the concepts such as patrie, tradition and peuple that were propagated by the P.C.F. in the late 1940s.34 Léger, in contrast, kept his distance from this
art de parti and created an “Arcadian landscape” to romanticize the nature and the life of the working class. He developed a special affection for trees, especially the leafless ones, seeing them as having an affinity with man and as “a reassuring counterpart” to a world of iron and concrete.35 When analyzing the fresco Léger designed for the Agricultural Pavilion at the
International Exhibition of 1937 (figure 8), Sarah Wilson associates the panel with the notion of “la vieille France – traditional, nurturing and agricultural.”36 Her observation can also apply to
the two ceramic reliefs at the south elevation of the museum. People playing, running and bicycling in the countryside are for Léger and leftists a reminiscence of the “leisure and
32 John Berger, Selected Essays (New York: Vintage International, 2001), 197.
33 Sarah Wilson, “The Triumph of Forces: Fernand Léger and the Popular Front,” in Fernand Léger:
Painting in Space, ed. Katia Baudin (Cologne: Museum Ludwig and Munich: Hirmer, 2016), 158.
34 Wilson, ‘“La Beauté Révolutionnaire”? Réalisme Socialiste and French Painting 1935-1954,’ 62-64. 35 Peter de Francia, Fernand Léger (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1983), 224. 36 Sarah Wilson, “Fernand Léger: Art and Politics 1935-1955,” in Fernand Léger: The Later Years
pleasure” of working class during the Popular Front when reduced working hours and paid holidays were first introduced.37
Art for the People
Léger was however firm and explicit about anti-Romanticism in support of deploying a non-hermetic visual language. The illustration of a cyclist on the south elevation is one of the most recognizable motifs that appears in Léger’s celebrated Les Loisirs, Hommage à David (1948-49, figure 3), which Léger envisaged as a shift and return to the simplicity of an art understandable to all. He liked Jacques-Louis David’s works because of their
“anti-impressionism.” 38 We can read Léger’s position as his anti-elite and anti-bourgeois response to
modern art. Léger believed that modern art had been exclusive to the elite – works of art were understood by museums and by the elite who owned their works, and he hoped to liberate modern art from this elite confinement.39 Léger identified a central cultural issue in post-World
War II France: liberal capitalism, he believed, failed to extend cultural, political and economic enfranchisement to all members of society, and both artists and museums were responsible for this. As an artist, Léger’s sense of loyalty to the people was his guiding principle. In an
unpublished article in 1933, he petitioned modern architects to have the people in mind: “The elite has followed you, agreed, that’s easy enough; but the others, the average group, has not been able to. […] in this race toward absolute Beauty, you have to glance behind yourselves all
37 Ibid.
38 Ibid., 197-198.
the time. You are alone, they haven’t been following you!”40 Under these circumstances, art with
easier readability and wider accessibility became a priority to Leger.
First of all, Léger had a vision of an ennobled working class. They, as represented by the cyclist on the ceramic panel, the human figures in Les Loisir (figure 3) and builders in Les Constructeurs, retained a Davidian classicist spirit of statuary dignity.41 Léger noted in 1925
about well-groomed workmen in dance halls: “they have their style and their tastes, they carefully choose their shoes and caps; their hairstyle is as studied as any woman’s.”42 The
dignified portrayal extended to their moral and intellectual qualities. “They make judgments quickly and well,” he wrote, “[…] They had accurately observed that everything depended on decisiveness and discretion. […] The whole world is teeming with life, ingenuity, charm, and wit.”43
In practice, many of Léger’s late works were inspired by his observations of and encounters with the people so that his portrayals of their living and working conditions would seem relatable and comprehensible to them. For instance, he was captivated by circus and
enjoyed acrobatic performances, which might have been the inspiration for his final monumental canvas La Grande Parade (1954, figure 9). A series of studies of the rider, the juggler, the clown and acrobats came from his observation of proletarian subjects. Les Constructeurs (1950),
another important work, was inspired by what he saw while driving in the Chevreuse valley:
40 Léger, “The Wall, the Architect, the Painter,” in Functions of Painting, 96. 41 Ina Conzen-Meairs, “Revolution and Tradition”, 17.
“three pylons for high-tension cables being built along the road.”44 Léger also attempted to learn
the way that working-class people spoke and thought. He mentioned more than once in his writings that he respected people’s language, “a slang” (argot) which he attempted to incorporate in his own pictorial language.45 But Léger’s pictorial language sometimes turned to be
symbolized and didactic. In the cyclist ceramic panel on the façade (figure 1), the form of the bicycle is softened, and its tenderness bears resemblance to the limbs of the human figure. The wheels of the bicycle, in Léger’s imagination, was symbolized as “the eternal cycle” and thus became an attribute of the people: “it’s human nature to break through boundaries, to grow, to push through freedom. Roundness is free.”46
The repetitive use of a central motif, representational or abstract, is not new in Léger’s work. Such motifs as bicycles (wheels), ropes, ball games and human limbs in his works from 1930s are significant components of Léger’s creative process, and the final state of a work is “the outcome of a determined search” for the motif.47 This process resonates with Léger’s affinity to
the way works of art were produced and viewed in the pre-Renaissance period. He was
fascinated by Romanesque paintings, Byzantine mosaics and murals of Gothic churches for the visibility of art on architecture.48 In the middle ages when the literacy was low, the recognizable
attributes of the saints depicted on stained glass in Gothic churches and their pervasive use in
44 De Francia, Fernand Léger, 198.
45 The term “slang” (argot) appeared in Léger, “Art and People” in Functions of Painting, 143. See also
the French version: Fernand Léger, “L’art et le peuple” in Fonctions de la peinture (Paris: Denoël, 1965), 180. I will discuss the term in Chapter two.
46 Léger, “The Circus” (1950) in Functions of Painting, 172-73. 47 Messer, Fernand Léger: Five Themes and Variations, 13.
48 Léger applauded the pre-Renaissance art and discussed its comparison to art produced in and after
different media rendered biblical stories intelligible to the public. This idea of art as part of daily experience also formulated Léger’s visionary plan of democratizing art.
Léger’s view of art in relation to the people was ambivalent. Inspired by the music of Erik Satie, who shared Léger’s anti-impressionism, Léger saw art as an accompaniment to people’s life with “no purpose that glide along undemandingly.”49 Instead of “the intellect”, it
appealed to sensibility. The work of art, said Léger in 1938, was “the resting place” where people admire without compelling to ask the meanings and representations. His art, like Satie’s music, was what people had “heard but not listened to.”50 Léger thereby viewed art as intrinsic to
people’s senses, but nevertheless he believed that this intrinsic perception was acquired through upbringing and education, as Bourdieu refuted the notion of the innate taste as a myth controlled by the elite to differentiate themselves from other classes, so as to perpetuate the social
hierarchy.
Léger advocated educational programs for the working class, to liberate the experience of art from the confinement of museums and to render it pervasive, in classrooms, in households, and in public places. From the late 1930s, Léger closely aligned with the leftist movements in France. He was an active member in the Association des Peintres et Sculpteurs de la Maison de la Culture, the organization with an aim to extend art and culture to the greater public and to reform the national artistic education. Artists of the Association collaborated with labor unions and offered art courses to workers. Léger himself in 1938 gave a series lectures on topics such as
film, color and painting.51 In the museums, lectures and guided tours were offered. Léger aimed,
through his works and the initiatives of the Association, to develop a new habitus for the working class to form their taste.52
The two ceramic reliefs on the south elevation disclose the formation and development of Léger’s pictorial language and embody Léger’s ideas about art and the people. They also stand as Léger’s critique of the reality that the working class not included in understanding and valuing works in his time. His pictorial language was a fusion of his own invention and “a slang” of the people. His own invention was a combination of various and even contrasting artistic traditions. He valued pre-Renaissance (primitive) art and artistic practice, as he believed that individual collecting by the elite started in the Renaissance and gradually led the art out of the public view. He did not, however, realize that Davidian classicism was in fact the legacy of the Renaissance. His Arcadian landscapes and nostalgic view of workers at leisure contradicted his own anti-Romanticism and materialist view.
Although with ambivalence, Léger’s pictorial language carried his hope for modern art to be non-hermetic and appeal to people’s sensibility. His exploration of people’s “slang” was manifest in the rendering of the mosaic mural of the south elevation. In contrast to the figural depictions on the ceramic panels, the polychromatic mosaic as a background contains various
51 For the history and missions of Maison de la Culture, and Léger’s involvement in the initiative of
supporting artists and democratizing art and culture among workers, see Matthew Affron, “Fernand Léger and The Spectacle of Objects,” PhD diss., Yale University, 1994.
52 Bourdieu defines habitus with postmodern undertones: habitus is both a “structuring structure” that
CHAPTER 2: COLOR AND WALL
Léger valued “slang” (argot), the people’s language. For Léger, slang as a language defined the people in a professional group, and could be their tools, techniques or products. Slang in this sense is close to the meaning of jargon. He believed that each profession
(corporation) had its own slang – painters, for example, had words and expressions of their own, and their slang was mostly their pictures.53 Léger was drawn to the idea of slang during the Great
War, the moment when he stepped out of his studio for the first time and worked with factory workers, pavers and miners – the working class. It was also a moment when the working class and their everyday life came to Léger’s attention. Slang also retains exclusivity and distinguishes one group from others, which echoes Bourdieu’s notion of habitus as a capacity to produce and differentiate classifiable practices and products including taste.54 As discussed in the first
chapter, Léger aimed to develop a new habitus for the working class to advance their taste in art. In its second sense, slang is among other things a way for people to express how to learn from and feel about works of art. Slang, being a jargon and a habitus especially of the working class, is key to Léger’s new modes of expression since the interwar period.
The portrayal of people at work and leisure was one of Léger’s means to relate to the working class, as seen in two ceramic reliefs at south elevation of the Musée national Fernand Léger and in some of his works in the 1950s under themes such as “The Country Outing” and
various depictions of the cyclist. Léger’s exploration of new mode of expression did not, however, end with depicting human figures or constructing narratives in the media of (easel) painting; rather he sought “a new realism” and explored different media. Color and wall became two fundamental ingredients of Léger’s mode of expression, and elucidated his notion of “new realism,” which incorporated his aesthetic and political sensibilities and distinguished them from socialist realism and mainstream abstract art. The mosaic murals and stained glass of the
museum played a distinctive role in demonstrating his explorations.
In 1987, almost twenty years after becoming a national museum, the Musée national Fernand Léger underwent an expansion. The architect Bernard Schoebel, a Grand Prix de Rome awardee, was appointed by the Ministry of Culture to work with Georges Bauquier on the expansion project.55 A new building was added to the north of the original one, and Bauquier
asked Heidi Mélano, who had been responsible for the execution of the mosaic mural on the south elevation, to realize the mosaic works for the new east and west façades (figures 10-11). In addition, large stained-glass windows were created for the west façade and the entrance hall (figure 13-14), following the same technique Léger used for the church windows at Audincourt in 1951. The west façade featured one large mosaic work after a decoration designed by Léger for the 1951 Milan Triennale (figure 12). The east façade consists of three mosaic panels; the one in the middle, Lesoiseaux sur fond Jaune (Birds on a Yellow Background), according to
Bauquier, was a larger version of the last painting that Léger worked on.56 The other two mosaic
works were also adapted from Léger’s paintings; their geometric patterns resemble his studies for the mural project for the General Assembly of the United Nations in New York, and also his
55 “Bâtiment et Jardin,” Musées Nationaux Alpes-Maritimes, accessed December 8, 2018.
https://en.musees-nationaux-alpesmaritimes.fr/fleger/node/16
paintings in the late 1930s, for example, Nature morte aux fruits sur fond blue (1939, figure 16). Both Nature morte and the studies for the UN murals shed light Léger’s perception of “new realism”.
“Un Nouveau Réalisme”57
In the late 1930s, Léger, like many other artists and writers, took part in serious reflections and debates on the future of modern art, known as the La Querelle du rélalisme (realism debate).58 These artists and writers were more or less in the circle of the Association des
Écrivains et Artistes Révolutionnaires (A.E.A.R.), a Communist-led institution founded in 1932 and expanded to be the Organisation des Maisons de la Culture in 1936 at the height of the Popular Front. Although their views differed, those involved in the debate all to some extent agreed that modern art was in crisis and challenged by new media like cinema and photography. As Maurice Denis wrote in Les problèmes d’aujourd’hui (1935), the progress of photography was considered detrimental to painting, especially portraiture, and the cinema gradually took the place of painting and became an art that was associated with life, a reflection of civilization and an expression of human feelings.59 Walter Benjamin was also skeptical of the ability of painting
to serve “les besoins collectifs.” The “aura” of a work of art, inseparable from its uniqueness and authenticity, generated a sense of remoteness and was maintained by “a natural distance from
57 This was the title of an essay written by Léger and published on Art Front in 1935.
58 La Querelle du réalisme, sponsored by the Maison de la Culture in 1936, consisted of three public
debates on painting techniques and the popularization of modern art. See Matthew Affron, “Fernand Léger and The Spectacle of Objects,” PhD diss., Yale University, 1994.
59 Maurice Denis, “Les problèmes d’aujourd’hui,” in Encyclopédie Française, vol.16, 70-1, ed. Pierre
reality.”60 For him, “aura” emerged in the Renaissance and related to an aesthetic reception that
was “passive” and “alienated” in nature and thus conformed to capitalist social relations.61
In his writings and lectures Léger shared Benjamin’s concern about the alienation brought by art. To Léger, the Renaissance marked the birth of capitalism and individualism, and easel painting marked the advent of an individualized society. In an unpublished essay written in 1933, Léger posited that although easel painting gave rise to “wonderful inventiveness,” it rendered visual art individualized and distanced from the interests of the public.62 This idea was
further developed in an unpublished 1950 essay in which Léger wrote that the Renaissance saw the rise of “new wealth,” people who started to possess works of art for their personal
collections, whereas previously the visual imagery of architecture – walls of churches, cathedrals, and monasteries – played a dominant role in people’s life and civilization.63
In response to the concurrent concern, artists and intellectuals of the A.E.A.R. were in general split into two trends: formal innovation and revolutionary themes.64 The former was
supported by artists like Paul Signac (1863-1935) to ensure aesthetic autonomy and artists’ independence, whilst the latter was advocated by the Surrealist Louis Aragon, a member of the P.C.F. and advocate of socialist realism. After the Popular Front, Aragon placed Léger at the center of controversy in that Léger firmly rejected socialist realism and aligned with abstract art
60 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed.
Hannah Arendt and trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 233-234.
61 Affron, “Fernand Léger and The Spectacle of Objects”, 195.
62 Léger, “The Wall, the Architect, the Painter” in Functions of Painting, 93. 63 Léger, “Mural Painting and Easel Painting” in Functions of Painting, 161.
64 Raymond Cogniat, “L'Exposition des artistes révolutionnaires mèle la peinture aux revendications
and the aesthetic of the machine. Aragon cast doubt on the social functions of Léger’s works and questioned how they, created with an undertone of capitalist production, could serve the best interests of the French working class.65 For example, in Léger’s 1939 painting Nature morte aux
fruits sur fond bleu (figure 16), the irregular and asymmetrical form recalled a tree without leaves. The center-right part of it was covered by some organic forms that one would see under a microscope. The geometric shapes that resembled tubes, metal blocks and plants or even organic shapes were inspired by science and machines.
In a series of lectures in 1935, Aragon started to show his commitment to communism by appropriating Stalin’s term “socialist realism.” Stalin created the Union of Soviet Writers in 1932 to exert a state control of arts, and under the dogma, writers and painters were instructed to produce works with “proper” themes.66 But Léger had a different concept of realism in concert
with Hungarian Marxist philosopher Georg Lukács. In his critique, Lukács perceived the limitation and idealization of socialist realism: “socialist realism is a possibility rather than an actuality; and the effective realization of the possibility is a complex affair.”67 Socialist realism
therefore introduced a fantasy in reality. Léger from 1937 to 1942 wrote at least three essays with “new realism” in the titles, and scholars read that deliberate differentiation from socialist realism as a response to Aragon’s challenge. For Léger, realism should not bear the realistic value in its most literal sense.68 Since the Renaissance, he maintains, the value of works of art
has been attached to their imitative quality (for example, the imposition of subject matter),
65 Louis Aragon, “Le Réalisme à l’ordre du jour,” Commune, no.37 (September, 1936), 28-30. 66 Wilson, ‘“La Beauté Révolutionnaire”? Réalisme Socialiste and French Painting 1935-1954,’, 61. 67 Georg Lukás, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, trans. John and Necke Mander (London: Merlin
Press, 1963), 96-97.
another aspect that made Léger consider Renaissance art as problematic and outdated for the modern world.69 The 1939 Nature morte exhibited Léger’s interests more in the new forms made
visible by scientific microscopes than the machines or the forms themselves (figure 16). Léger’s “realism” is thus new in the sense that he saw it in a dynamic movement, constantly responding to ongoing social, political and technological conditions. His realism was not the “truth of the object” but existed in the way that objects were rendered.70
Although Léger believed that art was vulgarized to “the 1000th degree” by cinema, he
was at the same time inspired by the potentiality of the big screen to reach out the public audience.71 Following Denis’s analysis, he saw the emergence of cinema and photography as a
new means to offer realistic (imitative) images and thus to arrogate the “popular side,” as cinema became a popular place among the workers.72 However, unlike Denis, who viewed the cinema as
a threat to painting, Léger understood that going to the movie theater had become the habitus of the working class, and optimistically moved on to explore how his notion of new realism would validate abstract art not only in his time but also in the future.
69 Léger, “The New Realism” (1935) in Functions of Painting, 109-110.
70 Hélène Lassalle, “Art Criticism as Strategy: the Idiom of ‘New Realism’ from Fernand Léger to the
Pierre Restany Group,” in Art Criticism since 1900, ed. Malcolm Gee (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1993), 204-205.
71 Léger’s position on cinema was ambiguous. On the one hand, he acknowledged that the popularization
of cinema and photography vulgarized art and taste of people. On the other hand, he was interested in experimenting the aesthetic innovation brought by this new technology. Jennifer Wild, for example, discusses how Chaplin’s films – his machine-like acting style and integration into everyday modern life – led Léger to develop a theoretical reflection on spectacle that human remained as subject and was also absorbed into the décor as an object. This theory was reflected in Léger’s film Ballet mécanique in 1923, and his canvases in the late 1920s and 1930s. See Jennifer Wild, “What Léger Saw: The Cinematic Spectacle and the Meteor of The Machine Age,” in Léger: Modern Art and The Metropolis, ed. Anna Vallye (Philadelphia, PA: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2013), 148-149. See also Léger, “Le nouveau réalisme continue” in Fonctions de la peinture (Paris: Denoël, 1965), 178.
“The Wall, The Architect, The Painter”73
“I just don’t understand this. It looks to me to be scrambled eggs,” Harry S. Truman reportedly commented on the mural paintings designed by Léger in the General Assembly Hall of the United Nations Headquarters in New York.74 When seeing the works on the façades of
Musée national Fernand Léger, perhaps one would also ask: what are these geometric and monumental forms representing. Léger never believed that modern art was in conflict with the interests of the working class; rather he thought that “total liberation has produced Abstract Art.”75 But abstract art was in trouble when paired with easel painting, and the only way for
abstract art to connect with the public in Léger’s view was through the mural. It is important to note that Léger’s abstract art was never quite abstract – he often included figurative patterns, or forms with an allusion to plants, trees and flowers, as seen in the mosaic panels of the Léger museum. Léger’s interests in mural art and monumental art started in the 1920s, and he might have gotten his ideas from a wide range of sources, from Russian examples to cinema and the billboards in the U.S.76 The façades of the Léger museum as well as some previous decorative
projects all reflected his experiments with abstract art in a monumental form.
In the mosaic works and stained glass on the museum façades, various geometric forms in vivid color and dynamic movement present a strong contrast to the monochromatic and static
73 This was the title of an unpublished essay written by Léger in 1933.
74 Ann Binlot, “Touching-Up the Légers: UN To Reopen with Mural Restored,” Observer, August 26
2014, https://observer.com/2014/08/touching-up-the-legers-u-n-to-reopen-with-restored-murals/ (access 9 December 2018).
75 Léger, “Mural Painting and Easel Painting” (1950) in Functions of Painting, 162.
76 De Francia suggests that Léger’s ideas on non-figurative art and the architectonic function were
background. Although each work has a different color scheme, no color other than bright yellow, blood orange, maroon red, metallic green and ocean blue is used, and they complement black and white. In Lesoiseaux sur fond Jaune, the mosaic panel in the middle, six brightly colored curved chunks against a yellow background spread randomly over the panel (figure 10). Two birds are flying across them, and the color of their bodies, white adorned with grey dots, corresponds to the color of clouds floating in the air at the back. The title suggests that the two birds are the subject of the painting, but the brightly colored chunks in fact are easier to catch viewers’ attention than the colorless birds, especially when they are seen from afar.
Non-figurative elements occupy two mosaic panels at side on the east façade, the large piece on the west façade and two stained glass (figure 10, 13-14). The enormous mosaic mural on the west was executed after Léger’s design for the French section of the 1951 Milan Triennial (figure 11-12). The form again recalls that in Nature morte (1939, figure 16) – a leafless tree. Its background is in bright yellow and dissected in the middle by a trunk, from which extend flowing branches. Black is used to delineate different shapes of the geometric forms and to increase their volumes. Colors in these works are not entirely contained in the given forms but cut across the black delineation, as if they have their own will. The contrast and extension of colors endow the surface with a new and animated spirit, so as to create monumental effects around the façade. From outside, as the image shows (figure 11), people admire the mosaic works from different vantage points. The basic architectural structure of the museum and the absence of flowers in the garden allow viewers’ attention to focus on the chromatic contrast between the polychromatic façades and the modest surrounding environment.
with mechanical aesthetics. In comparison, as seen in the mosaic murals, color on a giant wall creates monumentality, which in turn sidelines the figurative and non-figurative elements, and color itself becomes the new subject. This new potentiality brought by color and wall had been exhibited in other projects Léger carried out after World War II. Léger was deeply intrigued by Byzantine mosaics. His own first mosaic and architectural project was The Virgin of the Litany for the church of Notre-Dame-de-Toute-Grâce in Assy (1947-48, figure 17). In an abstract composition, the pediment was covered by asymmetrical and colored panels with the Virgin Mary depicted at the center. Different objects of the litanies as representational elements played a secondary role, as the primary impression was meant to be non-figurative: a variety of bright colors.77 Likewise, when executing Léger’s design for the General Assembly Hall (figure 15),
Brice Gregory, his former student, believed that the murals were “an example of Léger’s belief that abstract art functioned beautifully with the volumes of modern architecture.”78 The
abstraction of the murals was rendered by a shade of blue, white and burnt orange, which resonated with Léger’s perception of realism: color pairing with wall as a means to realize his spectacle of objects. It would not surprise us now to hear Léger’s response to Truman: “‘what does that represent’ has no meaning.”79
Léger valued pure color and contrast. According to Gregory, his initial impression of Léger’s atelier was “a shock of color and contrast.”80 Color is a crucial element in Léger’s
77 William S. Rubin, Modern Sacred Art and the Church of Assy (New York: Columbia University Press,
1960), 122.
78 Bruce Gregory, “Léger’s United Nations’ Mural,” Art Journal 23, no.1 (1963): 35.
79 Léger, “The New Realism” in Functions of Painting, 111. See also Léger, “The Problem of Freedom in
Art” in Functions of Painting, 165. It was an unpublished article written in 1950.
works: “Color is a vital necessity. It is raw material indispensable to life […] (and) its action is not merely decorative; it is also psychological. Connecting with light, it becomes intensity; it becomes social and human need.”81 Color and contrast, in Léger’s theory, “destroy” the wall and
render it plastic to create a new space of rhythm in architecture.82 As people respond to color
with emotion, color helps to build the sentimental bond between modern art and the people, so as to render modern art more comprehensible.
The partnership between color and wall thus enabled Léger to incorporate people’s slang in the creation and perception of his works. Slang here was not so much in the sense of jargon as that of habitus, which conditioned how people felt about art. Color and wall could potentially help people to associate with art in two ways. First, Léger and contemporaneous architects were aware of the therapeutic function of polychromy. Between 1953 and 1955, Léger and the Franco-American architect Paul Nelson established a joint venture for polychrome projects at the Centre Hospitalier Mémorial France-Etats-Unis in Saint-Lô. Warm and light-hearted colors were used for the interior and exterior projects, both as decorations and psychological support dedicated to the care of patients.83 Léger’s vision for interconnecting color with civic well-being culminated
in his project for a Village Polychrome (1952-53), in collaboration with André Bruyère.
Everything, in Léger’s imagination, were to be covered by colors in a pedestrian village close to Biot. But they never realized the project due to financial reasons.84 Second, color and wall
81 Léger, “Color in the World” (1938) in Functions of Painting, 119. It was written in 1938. 82 Léger, “Mural Painting and Easel Painting”, 161-162.
83 Donato Severo, “Therapeutic Polychrome and Architecture: The Collaboration between Fernand Léger
and Paul Nelson,” in Fernand Léger: Painting in Space, 168-170.
84 André Bruyère, “The Polychrome village, in collaboration with Fernand Léger (1953),” in Fernand
promoted the visibility of art in various types of public spaces and thus created places where people belonged, and art that they identified – a community among people and the working class, to be precise. This imaginative community resonated with the collective spirit in the artistic production during the pre-Renaissance era and also in the labor reforms during the Popular Front, which was valued and missed by Léger. French art journalist Pierre Descargues noticed that although the mosaic façade in Assy was denounced by many critics, it was welcomed by the Assy congregation, particularly among the shepherds. The “naïveté and frankness” in the visual representations of different objects indeed contributed to the intelligibility of the work, but it was the brightly colored mosaic panels that generated a distinctive visual impact. Local shepherds would stand before the façade “tous contents.”85
Adorned with polychromatic mosaics, stained glasses and ceramics, the architecture of the Léger museum embodied plastic vitality. The murals became works of art like others on display inside the museum, and further turned the whole museum into a work of art. Yet, the people might not identify the sense of belonging as the shepherds did in Assy. None of the murals was designed specifically for the museum, and they had been site-specific to places such as a stadium in Hannover and pavilion in Milan before being transplanted to the façades of the museum. The narratives and their functions other than the exhibiting value in the original sites were more or less lost. Some works like the mosaic pieces on the east façade were not fully integrated into the walls of the building but looked like three canvases hanging outside the museum (figure 10). Despite the great scale, they appear less like the murals on the south elevation but rather retained the independence and exclusivity of easel painting.
The decorations of the museum disclose Léger’s confrontations with abstract art and the doctrine of socialist realism since the interwar period. The decorative program and the museum itself are also the fruits of his discernment and exploration. He realized that people’s taste and aesthetic habits had been changed or even debased by the visual language of mechanical and commercial production. Instead of seeing them as a threat, he drew inspiration from machines, cinema and billboards as part of his campaign to renovate modern art, and invented his own pictorial language that seemed to be with “contrasted qualities”, as Robert L. Herbert concludes, “modern and traditional, primitive and classical, impersonal and unique” at the same time.86 The
invented mode of expression also reconciled his aesthetic imperative with his sense of responsibility to make art accessible to people, without turning to socialist realism.87 The
contrast continues in the museum with the juxtaposition of mosaic murals on the façade and easel paintings in the gallery, constantly challenging viewers in contemplating painting as a medium and as a category.
86 Robert L. Herbert, From Millet to Léger: Essays in Social Art History (New Haven and London: Yale
University Press), 151.
CHAPTER 3: WALKING IN THE RIVIERA AND BEYOND
In the garden of Musée national Fernand Léger stand two ceramic sculptures, Le jardin d’enfants (Playground, 1960, figure 18) and Fleur qui marche (Walking Flower, 1952, figure 19).88 “I did not want to see my Fleur qui marche in a museum,” André Verdet recounted
Léger’s dream about his sculpture. “I wished to see it in a public place, in the middle of beautiful new houses, inhaling light and the breath of trees.”89 In 1952, Léger designed Fleur qui marche
(Walking Flower) and exhibited it with the model of the Saint-Lô hospital.90 A plastic model was
produced and painted by Léger in 1954, but it was not realized as a monumental ceramic sculpture until 1957-1960, when the Léger museum was in construction. It now stands in the garden of the museum. Almost like a response to Léger’s initial idea of its physical presence, the Walking Flower finally took a stroll further to other places around the world. It was reproduced several times after 1954 and sent to various types of public spaces in Tokyo, New York City, Paris and Fukushima.
The Walking Flower is one of Léger’s most popular works, with versions of it found worldwide. It also anticipated the proliferation of the reproduction of Léger’s works from the
88 The English translation for Le jardin d’enfant is not consistent. It has been translated as Playground
and Kindergarten. In this thesis, I will refer to the work as Le jardin.
89 André Verdet, Le dynamism pictural (Genève: Editions Pierre Cailler, 1955), 89-90. Cited in De
Francia, Fernand Léger, 246. Also see Brunhammer, Fernand Léger: The Monumental Art, 140.
90 Léger and Paul Nelson established a joint venture between 1953 and 1955 to develop projects for the
museum collection, as state cultural assets, after the museum was nationalized. The journey of the Walking Flower thus offers a new perspective on Léger’s works in relation to the public and the role of the Léger museum. Through the reproduction and circulation of Léger’s works, his art, on the one hand, became visible in different public places and closer to the people. On the other hand, as seen in the case of the Walking Flower, the Léger museum where the
reproductions were authorized would potentially take on a new role as a center for producing art objects for the elite, a step away from its mission and Léger’s intention of democratizing art for the people. But this departure was not an entire rupture from Léger’s dream; rather the
oppositional aspects came to be integral to the museum.
In order to understand the contradictory narratives about Léger’s works and his museum, it is necessary to consider the larger cultural context in France at that time. In 1967, three
hundred works in the museum become “a national collection created by a man of genius,” as stated by Malraux who then served as Minister for Cultural Affairs and was present at the official hand-over.91 Since the nationalization of the museum turned Léger’s oeuvre into national
patrimony, the later appropriation of his works was acknowledged by the state, and should be examined through the lens of cultural politics. Malraux developed cultural policy for the Fifth Republic with a mission to bring a greater accessibility of art and culture, especially French art, to French people. The action plan was marked by numerous inaugurations of national buildings, and the nationalization of the Léger museum was one of the milestones of his plan.92 Moreover, a
deeper connection is evident between Léger’s pictorial language, as represented by the Walking
91 When de Gaulle returned to the office to establish the new Republic in 1958, Malraux was appointed to
be the first Minister for Cultural Affairs, and retained the position for ten years from 1959 and 1969. The quote was from his official visit to the Musée national Fernand Léger at Biot in 1969. See Boza, “André Malraux et Nadia Léger au musée Fernand Léger de Biot.”
Flower, and Malraux’s musée imaginaire (the imaginary museum), between the practice of Musée national Fernand Léger and that of Maisons de la culture (Houses of Culture), one of the hallmarks of Malraux’s cultural policy, on subjects such as the reproduction of artworks and transmitting art to the people.93
In contrast, Malraux’s cultural policy and the project of Maisons de la culture were criticized by contemporaneous theorists and sociologists. One of the influential figures was Pierre Bourdieu. Commissioned by Augustin Girard, the head of research at the Ministry for Cultural Affairs, Bourdieu, with sociologists Alain Darbel and Dominique Schnapper, conducted research on European art museums and visitors, and released their findings in 1969 as a report in book form. Bourdieu’s analysis of the relationship between power and culture, the issue that was also contemplated by Léger, is relevant for us to understand how the Léger museum departed from its original mission.
The Flower as An Intermediary
In the process of designing the garden of the Léger museum, the landscape architect Henri Fisch conceived of the space as “an open-air theatre” (un théâtre de verdure), a natural space where people relax, wander and appreciate the mosaics on the façades from different points of view. Serving as the focal point of the garden, the two sculptures are in dialogue with surrounding natural spaces and the architecture of the museum. The sculptures incorporate visual elements to imitate nature and life. The motif of the star-shaped flower, as seen in many of Léger’s canvases such as Les Loisirs (figure 3) and La Grande Julie (figure 4), reappears in the
93 Le musée imaginaire is translated into English as “the museum without walls”. Hannah Feldman argues
polychromatic sculptures. Beginning in the interwar period, natural elements like tree trunks and flowers returned as a subject matter and became a significant part of Léger’s works. In the humanoid form, the petals of the Walking Flower recall the shape of human limbs. With arms stretching out, it is moving forward as if about to stride across the garden and to engage with the natural space. The composition of Le jardin recalls the 1939 painting Nature Morte (figure 16) and a series of flower-themed paintings in 1937. The vertical components, resembling the forms of tree trunks and marine plants, are defined in glaring shades of yellow and orange, and
intersected by a flower-shaped sculpture. They are varied in figuration and height, and extend in different directions, revealing naturalness and liveliness. The glazed ceramic creates an uneven surface, which echoes the textures of real petals and plants and gives the sculpture a natural touch.
While the sculptures visually imitate the nature, their artificiality is noticeable. The Walking Flower is 3.15 meters tall (approximately 10.3 feet). The height of Le jardin is 6.6 meters (approximately 21.6 feet), and scaffolds were used when the sculpture was installed in 1960. The alternation between pure white and bright colors of the ceramics further strengthen the volume and solidity of each work, distinguishing the sculptures from the natural environment. In both sculptures, Léger attempted to create a self-contained space between nature and artificiality. Not attached to other artificial entities, the sculptures establish themselves in open air. Léger was fascinated by the vitality of plants, flowers and trees; in his word, “trees, I feel, have an animal force about them. In any case there is an affinity, for birds hide in them.”94 The sculptures are
also infused with expression and imagination, inviting people to enter and to experience the space. Léger designed Le jardin with children in mind: “it would be placed on the seashore.
94 François Mathey, Fernand Léger, 1881-1955 (Paris: Musée des arts décoratifs, 1956), 250. Cited in De
