Page 58 - Studio International - May 1970

London

commentary

FERNAND LEGER AT WADDINGTON GALLERIES
(IN CO-OPERATION WITH GALERIE BEYELER,
BASLE) TILL MAY 9; ANTOINE BOURDELLE AT
GROSVENOR, MAY 5-JUNE 5; RICHARD
HAMILTON RECENTLY AT THE TATE ; DAVID
HOCKNEY RECENTLY AT THE WHITECHAPEL

The fragments from Léger's writings which
appear below were originally selected by the
Galerie Beyeler of Basle for inclusion in the
catalogue which accompanied a remarkable
exhibition of Léger's work, held there in the
autumn of 1969. The same selection of paint-
ings (with a few additions and subtractions)
can be seen at the LESLIE WADDINGTON GAL-
LERIES until May 9. Not since the Tate exhibi-
tion of 1950 have London audiences had an
opportunity to study Léger's art on a com-
parable scale.
Léger's writings reflect a wide variety of
interests; and if occasionally they appear con-
tradictory this bears witness to his amazing
ability to involve himself in a wealth of pro-
gressive aesthetic ideas, often of a seemingly
irreconcilable nature. No other major twen-
tieth-century artist has assimilated such a wide
variety of contemporary idioms into his work.
After a brief flirtation with Fauvism, Léger
came to artistic maturity, and to fame, as the
most original of the 'independent' Cubists;
simultaneously he was drawn to futurist
ideas concerning the dynamism inherent in
modern, mechanized life (a recurrent theme
in his writings), and in a series of paintings
executed in the years following his discharge
from the army in 1917, he adapted certain with the film. The contradictions that appear If pictorial expression has changed it is
synthetic-cubist devices to give what was most in his statements and writings arise basically because modern life has made it necessary.
positive in the futurist programme, from a from the fact that as a socially-oriented artist A modern artist's existence is more con-
visual point of view, its highest expression. he came to feel the need for an art with a centrated and more complicated than it was
Himself a pioneer abstractionist (in his Con- strong popular appeal (and hence for an art in previous centuries. The image is less static,
trastes des Formes of 1913), he was deeply aware with a subject matter that could be easily appearances less defined than they were. A
of the power of Mondrian's mature de Stijl apprehended), while his cubist heritage, his landscape crossed and broken by a car or an
manner, and his attempt to graft its formal admiration for Mondrian, and his whole express train loses definition but gains in
grandeur on to the machine aesthetic of the classical bias drew him towards a kind of synthetic value, things seen from speeding
Purists (Ozenfant and Jeanneret) resulted, in painting in which formal values predominated. trains or cars are distorted. Modern man
the 1920s, in a series of works of extraordinary In the 1930s and 1940s his growing political registers a hundred times more impressions
vitality and power. Simultaneously, because awareness brought his art and his sympathies than an eighteenth-century artist, so much so
of his formalist concerns he was able to marry down on the side of what might be called pro- that our language is full of diminutives and
his machine-oriented vision to the contem- gressive Social Realism. Perhaps it is pre- abbreviations. The concentrated aspect of
porary neo-classical revival. The climate of cisely because of the duality of his approach modern painting, its variety, its break-up of
Surrealism was less congenial to him, but the and his interests that his work appears today shapes, stems from all this. It is certain that
movement's insistence on the displacement of as relevant to the hard-edge colourists of the the evolution of travel and the resulting
objects from their natural surroundings past decade as it does to the imagery of Pop. speeds have influenced the new way of seeing.
allowed him to underline his faith in the im- And his work demonstrates that it is possible Man must be distracted from his enormous
portance of the object in its own, independent to see both sides of the coin and yet remain and often disagreeable problems and made to
right, and to develop further his highly origi- sublimely monolithic as an artistic per- live in a new visual reality. (1914)
nal use of a free, non-associative space, a con- sonality. q
cept that had originated in his experiments JOHN GOLDING From the time painting was liberated by the