Fernand Leger

Takim wierszykiem miał witać Tadeusza Peipera w Krakowie najgłośniejszy z krakowskich futurystów. A przynajmniej tak to zapamiętał gimnazjalista Jalu Kurek, późniejszy wyznawca futuryzmu
i uczeń Peipera. Jeśli rzeczywiście tak było, trzeba spytać, kim dla
lokalnego środowiska był ów tajemniczy przybysz, który na przełomie
1920 i 1921 powrócił do Krakowa, po sześciu i pół roku spędzonych
na przeciwległych kresach Europy?

Edition, annotation et présentation d'une source épistolaire : la correspondance de Fernand Léger à André Mare, et l'épouse de ce dernier, Charlotte (née Merlin). 50 lettres échangées entre 1906 et 1932, qui permettent d'aborder sous un jour nouveau à la fois la vie et l'oeuvre de deux amis d'enfance, originaires de la même ville de Normandie, avant de s'affirmer comme des figures majeures de l'avant-garde artistique de Paris du début du XXe siècle.

Quatrième de couverture :
Natifs d’Argentan (Orne), le peintre Fernand Léger (1881-1955) et le décorateur André Mare (1885-1932) partagent un même goût du dessin à l’adolescence et débutent ensemble, à Montparnasse, leur parcours artistique. Cette correspondance inédite apporte de précieux éclairages sur leurs œuvres graphiques et révèle l’enjeu d’une amitié stimulante quant à leur vocation d’artistes. Si leurs styles sont différents, Fernand Léger fait également œuvre de décorateur au fil de ses tapisseries, mosaïques, vitraux et céramiques et André Mare œuvre de peintre, de ses fameux Carnets de guerre à ses délicats portraits d’intimes et tableaux de paysages normands.
Charlotte Mare, née Merlin (1883-1964), est l’amie d’enfance d’André Mare qu’elle épouse en 1910 avec Fernand Léger comme garçon d’honneur. Aussi, cette correspondance dotée d’une iconographie rare est-elle largement enrichie d’extraits de lettres échangées entre André et Charlotte et des mémoires inédits de cette dernière qui fut cantatrice et professeure de chant.

Cette correspondance est préfacée par Michel Onfray, également natif d’Argentan. Elle est présentée et annotée par Tristan Rondeau, chercheur, diplômé de l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. Elle est précédée de textes introductifs des historiens Laurence Graffin, Yves Chevrefils Desbiolles, Jean-Christophe Orticoni et Benoît Noël.

Presenting one of several chapters in a book of the same name, the author proves that the rhythmic organization of the film Ballet mécanique by Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy, according to a graph of its construction published at the time of its premiere, included relative, rational, and recurring speeds. This is the first study to point to the use of periodicity throughout the film imagery and montage and to argue that tempo is the film's principal organizing element. The tempos or speeds were codified within a graphic published twice by Léger. The premise is tested against the print screened at the film's 1924 premiere. The author's wide sampling of tempos throughout the film reveals for the first time the extent to which the montage conforms to the published graph and confirms that relative rather than random tempos were applied to both footage and montage. The discovery of ratios embedded in the graphic enables recovery of a unique experiment that sought musical form within film - and in this case, within a film that on the surface appears to reflect random and chaotic procedures.

This is volume 6 of the Catalogue raisonné of the Orozco collection of artist and illustrated books as well as prints, dedicated to Henri Matisse, Edouard Pignon and Fernand Léger. It describes the pieces of the collection, the circumstances under which they were produced, references to the museums throughout the world that keep a copy of the piece described, the appropriate catalogue references, their passage through auction houses, etc. and photographs of the pieces.

A un secolo di distanza, questo libro volge lo sguardo a uno tra i grandi protagonisti delle avanguardie artistiche. La produzione di Léger, negli anni cruciali prima del conflitto mondiale, è setacciata in maniera capillare: non solo i capolavori acclamati, ma anche le opere considerate “minori”. Tra queste, la fitta produzione di disegni è stata riordinata nel suo complesso, per la prima volta. Da tale prospettiva è stato possibile seguire il percorso sperimentale che ha condotto ai grandi dipinti, svelandone motivazioni spesso trascurate. Ma la trattazione non si limita al dialogo a due con l’autore prescelto: al contrario si dà un impianto corale, che coinvolge la vasta rete di relazioni che legano Léger ai compagni dell’avanguardia. Ne risulta una rilettura del cubismo in senso lato, nelle sue connessioni con le tendenze pittoriche internazionali e con gli operatori di altre discipline, quali i poeti, i filosofi, i compositori musicali. Il tutto è condotto con rigore e chiarezza d’esposizione, in riferimento costante alle fonti e agli studi storiografici, da quelli ormai classici ai più recenti.

The Myrbor tapestries are fraught with problems due to their colonialist narrative, which leads to trouble when artistic institutions attempt to display them. We know little to nothing of the workers who produced these tapestries. The question of whether these objects belong in a textiles department or in a department of modern art is a difficult one for many curators. Additionally, modern tapestries raise complicated questions regarding their authorship, as they often have a separate artist, commissioner, manufacturer, and owner. Furthermore, with Marie Cuttoli insisting that the tapestries produced through Maison Myrbor be manufactured in editions of five, the value of these weavings as original works of art was negatively impacted. Still, we must ask: if the museum’s duty is to share the objects in its collection, are these reasons enough to warrant the sequestering of these modern tapestries? And, as for the issues they encounter, we must ask how will the museum determine who the real maker of these modern tapestries is—is it the textile house or the artist themselves? If the textile house and the artist are from different cultures, where is the object truly from? On what rationale are these decisions based?

This paper examines the apparent contradictions between the use of the fragmented close-up in Fernand Léger’s film Ballet mécanique (1924) and his depiction of the cohesive face in his painting in the early 1920s. I argue that this paradox stems from Léger’s seeing, in certain pre-war movements whose aesthetics were premised on fragmentation, an endorsement of the supreme value of technology and modernity to the human subject, and of the suborning of that subject to industrial modernity, with all the catastrophic human consequences that were then witnessed in World War One. These ‘aesthetics of fragmentation’ are then compared and contrasted with Purism’s post-war reconciliation of “man” as a cohesive being, achieved through its conservative revision of modernist aesthetics. This critique is effected through the “portmanteau” of Ballet mécanique, which is effectively an assemblage of different pre-war modernist aesthetics contrasted with Purist depictions of cohesive form.

Keywords
Léger; Ballet mécanique; Purism; Futurism; Modernism; Rappel-à-l’ordre

"Los inicios de la Vanguardia Artística en el cine francés de los años veinte. L’Inhumaine [Marcel L’Herbier, 1924]"
ON CINEMA | 2013. Centro de Estudios Arnaldo Araújo, Escola Superior Artística do Porto.Oporto, 2013. pp. 1-16.
ISBN: 978-972-8784-41-6

Abstract:
Robert Mallet Stevens has been a significant figure in the artistic world and modern French architecture during the interwar period. His early work was marked by the undeniable legacy of the Viennese Secession, from Stoclet Palace, but evolved, from 1922, to an eclectic and personal style, synthesis of rationalism, neoplasticism and art déco. One of his architectural works, Villa Noailles, starred an interesting short film with surrealist trend, Les mystères du Château du Dé, 1928, directed by the surrealist artist Man Ray. The architect remained linked to the avantgarde of the time, and made also several stage sets for film and theater, receiving in 1924 the commission to design the set of
the film L'Inumaine of Marcel L'Herbier. The film has gone down in history because it was a great sort of summary of everything that was plastic research in France: the outer housing of the protagonists were designed by Mallet Stevens, the garden and the greenhouse were made by the future director Claude Autant-Lara, Fernand Léger designed the laboratory and other spaces were designed by also the future director Alberto Cavalcanti, Pierre Chareau took part in furniture design, Lalique, Jean Luce and Jean Puiforcat made some
decorative elements, Raymond Templier designed jewelry and Paul Poiret created costumes. In the film buildings were orthogonal with intersected volumes, following the more radical stile of the rationalism, and details and decorative objects represent attractive examples of what would later be called art deco style.
Although sophisticated designs of this group of great artists not excited the masses, some years later the public would admire its visual richness. Furthermore other French films continued the attempt to link the avant-garde design, rationalist architecture and cinema, and all of them are brilliant examples of the glory of French artistic expresions during those dreamy years.

This essay focuses on the illustrations of the apocalyptic passage of "silence in heaven" (Revelation 8.1) in a group of medieval manuscripts of the Commentary on the Apocalypse by the Spanish monk Beatus of Liébana, dated from the 10th to the 12th centuries. These images present a fascinating variety of pictorial solutions that have been largely overlooked by art historians: the combination of abstract and symbolic patterns, the deconstruction of script, and the exploration of the materiality of the parchment as a theatrical milieu to make silence present and palpable. I begin by tracing the textual and visual origins of the motif, advancing a hypothesis on the probable existence of a pictorial archetype from Beatus’ own time (8th century), and continue by analyzing the conditions of production and reception of these images in the context of 10th-century Mozarabic monasticism and within practice of lectio divina, where the concept of silence acquired multiple meanings. To conclude, I develop a theoretical reflection on the problematics of the representation of silence, drawing analogies with several 20th-century artists such as John Cage and Robert Rauschenberg whose artistic experiments around this theme find their medieval counterparts in the productions of remarkable illuminators such as Ovecus and Petrus. Framing this essay is a critical examination of the results of the engagement of painters Fernand Léger and Roberto Matta with the illustrations of one of these manuscripts, the so-called Morgan Beatus, which had been famously introduced to them by Meyer Schapiro in the 1930´s, shedding light on the complexities of the dialogue between medieval and modern art.

Il presente album è riservato a scopi scientifici e didattici, senza alcuna finalità di lucro: qualsiasi altro utilizzo non è autorizzato. Secondo il comma 1-bis dell’articolo 70 LdA del gennaio 2008 della Repubblica Italiana: “E’ consentita la libera pubblicazione attraverso la rete Internet, a titolo gratuito, di immagini e musiche a bassa risoluzione o degradate, per uso didattico o scientifico e solo nel caso in cui tale utilizzo non sia a scopo di lucro”.

Awangarda w kinie pozostaje na obrzeżach sztuki filmowej. Inaczej niż w malarstwie, w którym „szybko stała się mainstreamem oraz gdzie nowatorskość i nowe formy wyrazu stały się nieodzownymi elementami struktury instytucjonalnej, kino pozostaje popularną sztuką komercyjną z publicznością masową”.

This dissertation offers a critical reassessment of modernist involvement in the Sacred Art Movement, the highly controversial Catholic art renaissance undertaken by the French Dominican Order between 1937 and 1954. Marie-Alain Couturier and Pie-Raymond Régamey, the Dominican co-editors of the influential religious art journal L’Art Sacré, led the Sacred Art Movement by arguing that to reveal the timelessness and universality of Catholic themes in the modern world, “it would be safer to turn to geniuses without faith than to believers without talent.” Far less understood are the motives that compelled these same “geniuses without faith” to create art for the Catholic Church at such a tense political moment.
I bring new insight to modernist interest in religious space by reframing the three sites at the center of the Sacred Art Movement debates as sites of international art pilgrimage that helped to promote the “avant-garde” character of the French tradition. I argue that the scandals that surround Notre-Dame de Toute-Grâce in Assy, Henri Matisse’s Chapelle du Rosaire in Vence, and Pablo Picasso’s Temple of War and Peace in Vallauris obscure a pressing, post-traumatic desire by older modernists to leave an enduring record of their legacy in the illustrious tradition of Catholic monumentality. Willing to set aside their ideological differences for the sake of their ambition, this older generation of French modernists sought to create a religious monument along the lines of Giotto, Michelangelo, and Bernini, and to claim a similar rank within the art historical canon. This dissertation therefore elucidates the shared, historicizing impulse behind these sites to tell a new story of the Sacred Art Movement, the story of modern art’s “canonization.”

"Cubism constitutes one of the greatest revolutions in the history of Western art, on a par with the one launched at the beginning of the fifteenth century by two other young artists, in another booming economic and cultural center permitting radical innovations within the realms of the arts and sciences..."

http://www.caareviews.org/reviews/2611

Ce texte a été écrit pour le catalogue qui devait accompagner l’exposition d’Imi Knoebel, inaugurée au Musée national Fernand Léger de Biot, en Provence, le 5 novembre 2016. Finalement, le catalogue n’a pu être réalisé. On trouvera ici le manuscrit dans sa version originale française. L’exposition s’inscrivant dans une série qui consiste à inviter des artistes à réagir au Musée et à l’œuvre de Fernand Léger, le texte, à partir du travail d’Imi Knoebel et des rapports qu’il établit entre ses œuvres et quelques céramiques de Léger, aborde des questions plus générales : ce qu’est l’influence artistique et en quoi peut consister un dialogue entre un artiste vivant et un artiste historique. En cours de route on découvrira, à la faveur de cette confrontation inhabituelle, de nouveaux aspects de l’œuvre de Fernand Léger.

https://youtu.be/U7OVxyL-z68. “Cubist Architecture: The Villa Savoye” presents cubist principles of Le Corbusier’s 1928-31 house, such as the conceptual modernity of a “machine to live in,” light coming from multiple sources that are not readily identifiable, and the “free plan” that brings a playful inside/outside ambiguity. Moving around the ramp is like walking into an architectural collage, where the visitor can participate in the cubist experience at leisure.
The film is based on a chapter of May Spangler’s book, “Paris in Architecture, Literature, and Art” (New York: Peter Lang, 2018).

According to Peter Bürger’s widely cited Theory of the Avant-garde, radical modernist movements had an urge for subverting the bourgeois institutions of cultural production. However, many post-WWI avant-garde editors were eager to forge alliance with various sectors of the economy, rather than opposing them. Dozens of publications can be quoted investigating the potential synergies deriving from the merge of avant-garde art and various phenomena of interwar capitalism. Surprisingly enough, these left-wing authors, while criticizing the capitalist system of organizing production, also found some of the distinguishing characteristics of capitalist economic order inspirational. 1920s avant-garde journals were overflowing with articles exploring the perspectives opened up by Fordism, Taylorism, standardization, rationalization, and »scientific management« in general.

Employing the methodological toolkit of periodical studies, I will deal with the perception of capitalism in 1920s avant-garde periodicals, predominantly from the Central and Eastern European scene, rather than the already well-known Western Functionalisms. I will examine the following: What kind of political economy was envisioned in these magazines? How were they related to the aesthetic practices and theories of their editors, to their own role in the actual cultural ecosystem, and to the position of their journals in the periodical press market?

My hypothesis is that, for a brief span of time after WWI, the driving ambition of avant-garde periodicals was to rewrite the sign system of modernity. Employing a sort of radical imagination, instead of merely opposing it, they de- and reconstructed capitalism in order to create their utopian social visions. I will also investigate the far-reaching polarizing effects of this intellectual undertaking on the avant-garde scene itself. By the time of the Great Depression, we find part of these one-time avant-garde editors in illegal anti-establishment movements, and the other part of them designing modernist villas in the suburbs of Budapest, Bratislava or Brno.

https://issuu.com/sobranie-art/docs/4_2018_sobranie_art_and_culture  Sobraniye. Iskusstvo i kultura (Collezione. Arte e Cultura). № 4 (49), settembre 2018. pp. 82-91. (in russo)

Журнал «Собрание. Искусство и культура» № 4 (49), сентябрь 2018. — С. 82—91.

Three Articles of Posthuman Modernism: The Meta-Cinema of Marcel L’Herbier (and Friends)


April 2019

This paper reads Marcel L’Herbier’s The Inhuman Woman as an exemplary expression of a posthuman moment in modernism. Drawing on comparisons with the art of Fernand Léger and James Joyce, it highlights several elements of the film’s aesthetic – its heavily stylized compositions, its striking use of set design and costumes to subvert the visual syntax of foreground and background, its eroticization of technology, its disassembly of the human figure – in order to demonstrate the continuity between a high-modernist discourse on machine-life and current issues in posthuman theory. Both modernism and the posthuman respond to an epochal event within modernity, a technological acceleration of reality that reshapes ontological grammars. Both contemplate reality as a middle ground of mechanical and vital processes. And both are committed to a Copernican decentering of the human eye from its place of privilege in received models of phenomenal experience.

In 1920, Willa Cather’s second collection of short stories included “Coming, Aphrodite!,” a story focusing on the relationship between painter Don Hedger and opera singer Eden Bower and their disagreements concerning the aesthetics of art. Cather, a so-called Francophile, made her first trip to Europe with Isabella McClung some eighteen years prior, to tour the English and French cultures and see artists she had for so long admired. It was during this journey that, “with all the fire and immediacy of the modern age, she first began to feel the admiration and love of French art [and] French form, which has set such an impress on her work," no doubt involving the great influence of the Aesthetic Movement, or the idea of l’art pour l’art that had so greatly penetrated European artists’ lives. Regarding the influence of France on Cather during her first visit to that country, Robert Thacker writes “Poised as she was . . . on the verge of her most mature and complex writing, Cather was about to reach the goal she had set for herself while she was still living in Nebraska. Like Eden Bower in ‘Coming, Aphrodite!’ who knew early ‘that she was to be Eden Bower,’ Willa Sibert Cather . . . was about to become Willa Cather, author indeed, in the midst of her own major phase” (Thacker 2006, 45). Indeed, Willa Cather was strongly affected by the beauty of the French art she viewed as demonstrated in the strong correlation between the artistic philosophies of France’s burgeoning artistic icon, Fernand Léger, and her own character, Don Hedger.

Per gli artisti delle avanguardie storiche il cinema è il dispositivo che sovverte le arti visuali tradizionali grazie alla sua possibilità di intervenire sulla rappresentazione, trasformando le dimensioni (scala di piani) e i si- gnificati (associazioni metonimiche, dunque montaggio) di ciò che viene ripreso. Dei volti umani possono mostrare valori iconici e formali affini a quelli di un oggetto e al contempo gli oggetti inanimati possono acquisire un ritmo e una vitalità al di fuori della materia.
Il film Ballet mécanique di Fernand Léger e Dudley Murphy (1924), esemplare nell’ambito dell’avanguardia europea, può risultare un interessante studio di caso sulla rappresentazione dell’inanimato a carico dell’avanguardia. Il ballo meccanico è un’esplorazione di immagini di vita dell’era industriale fatta di primi piani, ripetizioni, oscillazioni e peculiari vedute di oggetti.

Der Text wurde für einen Katalog geschrieben, der Imi Knoebels Ausstellung im Musée National Fernand Léger in Biot, in der französischen Provence, begleiten sollte, welche dort am 5. November 2016 eröffnet wurde. Letztlich kam der Katalog leider nicht zustande. Dies ist die deutsche Übersetzung des ursprünglich in Französisch verfassten Manuskripts. Die Ausstellung gehörte zu einer Serie, deren Konzept darin besteht, Künstler einzuladen auf das Museum und auf Fernand Léger zu reagieren. Dementsprechend setzt sich der Text, ausgehend von Knoebels Arbeitsweise und den konkreten Wechselwirkungen zwischen seinen Arbeiten und einigen Keramiken von Léger, auch mit allgemeineren Fragestellungen auseinander, wie zum Beispiel die nach künstlerischem Einfluss oder danach, worin überhaupt ein kunstimmanenter Dialog zwischen einem lebenden und einem historischen Künstler bestehen kann. Dabei wird man auch auf weniger bekannte Aspekte des Werkes von Fernand Léger stoßen.

This paper reads Marcel L’Herbier’s The Inhuman Woman as an exemplary expression of a posthuman moment in modernism. Drawing on comparisons with the art of Fernand Léger and James Joyce, it highlights several elements of the film’s aesthetic – its heavily stylized compositions, its striking use of set design and costumes to subvert the visual syntax of foreground and background, its eroticization of technology, its disassembly of the human figure – in order to demonstrate the continuity between a high-modernist discourse on machine-life and current issues in posthuman theory. Both modernism and the posthuman respond to an epochal event within modernity, a technological acceleration of reality that reshapes ontological grammars. Both contemplate reality as a middle ground of mechanical and vital processes. And both are committed to a Copernican decentering of the human eye from its place of privilege in received models of phenomenal experience.

The article focuses on the history of the failed synchronization between Ballet mécanique film (Murphy/Léger/Ray/Pound) and music (Antheil), on the verge of a new version of the piece by Winfried Ritsch at the Kunsthaus Graz exhibition on Peter Kogler.