Fernand Léger “Men in the City” (Les Hommes dans la Ville) at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice

Léger, Men in the City

“No one knew better than Léger sees the eminent place of colour in today's world.

Our quietest landscapes are bristled with metal constructions and billboards, the walls of our cities are scattered with posters, our streets are screaming signs.

The present man is immersed in a wild battle of colours.

Fairs, theatres, cinemas, shops, showcases, cut and overlap their spasmodic glow.

So many violent contrasts reflecting in Léger's painting and would determine an unbearable cacophony if he did not bend them to his will and his style.

This colour, he never mixes it, he uses it pure and wide flat, he even dissociates it from the form, thus rendering it to its own destiny.

From then on, she can hole the canvas or rush to our eye, striking our sensitivity with prodigious strength.


Léger, Men in the City And this is how, by chords and oppositions, moves forward and recoil of tones, Léger created a new space. This new space, which is undoubtedly Léger's main contribution to modern painting, is not only suggested by contrasting colours, also by contrasting shapes.

Everything else is contrasted in his art.

Contrast patterns: flowers and mechanical elements, a character and a keychain.

Contrast lines: a ladder and a wheel, a disc and a chequerboard.

Contrast movements: a tree trunk and a dancer, a plank and a rotating propeller.

The most motley objects can be found on the same picture, as well as the most static shapes with the most dynamic.

Sometimes architecture disappears, the canvas offers scattered objects whose presence is not justified by nature, logic, vision.

However, so disparate, so rough as the contrasts maybe, Léger manages to reconcile everything thanks to an accurate distribution of colours, movements, full and voids, thanks to the lines that he sneaks through the composition and whose edges he beams.

The formula of a literary critic can also apply to Léger: Compose order with anarchy.”
Frank Elgar

Léger, Men in the City

“I remember seeing Fernand Léger in Venice at a Biennale.

All the painters who passed there, from Kokoschka to Raoul Dufy, crunched one or two gondolas with watercolour sauce, or from a Florian table or a Quadri window painted the cascades of light that bounce on St Mark's Square from the dome of the basilica and the bright facade of the Doge's Palace.

Fernand Léger passed by, walked, and when asked for his feelings, he answered: It is very beautiful, but did you see Mestre?

Mestre is the opposite of Venice.

It is the industrial city where the torches of oil refineries burn high in the sky, where the spheres of deposits shine in the sun, where red and black cargo ships are seen slipping between farms, because the countryside is also a port.

That was the show Fernand Léger preferred.

I was wondering then if there was any assignment in such a choice. But no: Fernand Léger really loved what his time was.”
Pierre Descargues

Léger, Men in the City

Léger, Men in the City

Léger, Men in the City