Le Corbusier
Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, known as Le Corbusier, was a Swiss-French architect, painter, urban planner and one of the pioneers of what is now called modern architecture. He was born in Switzerland and became a French citizen in 1930, his career spanned five decades, he designed buildings in Europe, Japan and North and South America. Dedicated to providing better living conditions for the residents of crowded cities, Le Corbusier was influential in urban planning, was a founding member of the Congrès International d'Architecture Moderne. Le Corbusier prepared the master plan for the city of Chandigarh in India, contributed specific designs for several buildings there. On 17 July 2016, seventeen projects by Le Corbusier in seven countries were inscribed in the list of UNESCO World Heritage Sites as The Architectural Work of Le Corbusier, an Outstanding Contribution to the Modern Movement. Charles-Édouard Jeanneret was born on 6 October 1887 in La Chaux-de-Fonds, a small city in the French-speaking Neuchâtel canton in north-western Switzerland, in the Jura mountains, just 5 kilometres across the border from France.
It was an industrial town, devoted to the manufacture of watches. His father was an artisan who enameled watches, while his mother gave piano lessons, his elder brother Albert was an amateur violinist. He attended a kindergarten. Like his contemporaries Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier did not have formal academic training as an architect, he was attracted to the visual arts and at the age of fifteen he entered the municipal art school in La-Chaux-de-Fonds which taught the applied arts connected with watchmaking. Three years he attended the higher course of decoration, founded by the painter Charles L'Eplattenier, who had studied in Budapest and Paris. Le Corbusier wrote that L'Eplattenier had made him "a man of the woods" and taught him painting from nature, his father took him into the mountains around the town. He wrote "we were on mountaintops, his architecture teacher in the Art School was the architect René Chapallaz, who had a large influence on Le Corbusier's earliest house designs.
However, he reported that it was the art teacher L'Eplattenier who made him choose architecture. "I had a horror of architecture and architects," he wrote. "... I was sixteen, I accepted the verdict and I obeyed. I moved into architecture." Le Corbusier began teaching himself by going to the library to read about architecture and philosophy, by visiting museums, by sketching buildings, by constructing them. In 1905, he and two other students, under the supervision of their teacher, René Chapallaz and built his first house, the Villa Fallet, for the engraver Louis Fallet, a friend of his teacher Charles L'Eplattenier. Located on the forested hillside near Chaux-de-fonds, it was a large chalet with a steep roof in the local alpine style and crafted colored geometric patterns on the façade. The success of this house led to his construction of two similar houses, the Villas Jacquemet and Stotzer, in the same area. In September 1907, he made his first trip outside of Switzerland. In Florence, he visited the Florence Charterhouse in Galluzzo, which made a lifelong impression on him.
"I would have liked to live in one of what they called their cells," he wrote later. "It was the solution for a unique kind of worker's housing, or rather for a terrestrial paradise." He traveled to Paris, during fourteen months between 1908 until 1910 he worked as a draftsman in the office of the architect Auguste Perret, the pioneer of the use of reinforced concrete in residential construction and the architect of the Art Deco landmark Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. Two years between October 1910 and March 1911, he traveled to Germany and worked four months in the office Peter Behrens, where Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius were working and learning. In 1911, he traveled again for five months, he spoke of what he saw during this trip in many of his books, it was the subject of his last book, Le Voyage d'Orient. In 1912, he began his most ambitious project. Located on the forested hillside near La-Chaux-de-Fonds; the Jeanneret-Perret house was larger than the others, in a more innovative style.
The interior spaces were organized around the four pillars of the salon in the center, foretelling the open interiors he would create in his buildings. The project was more expensive to build. However, it led to a commission to build an more imposing villa in the nearby village of Le Locle for a wealthy watch manufacturer. Georges Favre-Jacot. Le Corbusier designed the new house in less than a month; the building was designed to fit its hillside site, interior plan was spacious and designed around a courtyard for maximum light, significant de
Musée National d'Art Moderne
The Musée National d'Art Moderne is the national museum for modern art of France. It is housed in the Centre Pompidou in the 4th arrondissement of the city, it is among the most visited art museums in the world and one of the largest for modern and contemporary art. In 1937, the Musée National d'Art Moderne succeeded the Musée du Luxembourg, established in 1818 by King Louis XVIII as the first museum of contemporary art created in Europe, devoted to living artists whose work was due to join the Louvre 10 years after their death. Imagined as early as 1929 by Auguste Perret to replace the old Palais du Trocadero, the construction of a museum of modern art was decided in 1934 in the western wing of the Palais de Tokyo. Completed in 1937 for that year's International Exhibition of Arts and Technology, it was temporarily used for another purpose, since the exhibition of national and foreign art indépendant was preferably held in the Petit Palais and the Musée du Jeu de Paume. Although due to open in 1939, construction was interrupted by the war.
But its real inauguration didn't take place until 1947, after World War II and the addition of the foreign schools collection of the Musée du Luxembourg, held at the Musée du Jeu de Paume since 1922. In 1947 housed in the Palais de Tokyo, its collection was increased by its first director, Jean Cassou, thanks to his special relationship with many prominent artists or their families, such as Picasso and Braque. With the creation of the Centre Pompidou, the museum moved to its current location in 1977; the museum has the second largest collection of modern and contemporary art in the world, after the Museum of Modern Art in New York, with more than 100,000 works of art by 6,400 artists from 90 countries since Fauvism in 1905. These works include painting, drawing, photography, new media and design. A part of the collection is exhibited every two years alternately in an 18,500-square-metre space divided between two floors, one for modern art, the other for contemporary art, 5 exhibition halls, on a total of 28,000 m2 within the Centre Pompidou.
The Atelier Brancusi is located in its own building adjacent to the museum. The works displayed in the museum change in order to show to the public the variety and depth of the collection. Many major temporary exhibitions of modern and contemporary art have taken place on a separate floor over the years, among them many one-person exhibitions. Since 2010, the museum has displayed unique, temporary exhibitions in its provincial branch, the Centre Pompidou-Metz, in a 10,000-square-metre space divided between 3 galleries and since 2015, in Málaga, 2018, in Brussels, Belgium. Many styles of modern art, including Fauvism, Cubism, Abstract art, Surrealism are represented with works by Matisse, André Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck, Raoul Dufy, Albert Marquet, Le Douanier Rousseau, Paul Signac, Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, Fernand Léger, Juan Gris, Frida Kahlo, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, August Macke, Alexej von Jawlensky, Emil Nolde, Oskar Kokoschka, Otto Dix, George Grosz, Kurt Schwitters, Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, Carlo Carrà, Umberto Boccioni, Giacomo Balla, Gino Severini, Marc Chagall, Natalia Goncharova, Mikhail Larionov, Alexander Rodchenko, František Kupka, Piet Mondrian, Theo van Doesburg, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Kasimir Malevich, Jacques Villon, Robert Delaunay, Sonia Delaunay, Georges Rouault, Max Beckmann, Constantin Brâncuși, Alexander Calder, Chaïm Soutine, Amedeo Modigliani, Kees van Dongen, Jean Arp, Giorgio de Chirico, André Breton, Max Ernst, Joan Miró, Man Ray, Alberto Giacometti, René Iché, Nicolas de Staël, André Masson, Yves Tanguy, Jean Tinguely, Simon Hantaï, Yves Klein, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Willem de Kooning, Francis Bacon.
Pop Art, Nouveau Réalisme, Conceptual art and other tendencies or groups are represented with works by Andy Warhol, Richard Hamilton, Dan Flavin, Eduardo Arroyo, Dan Graham, Daniel Buren, George Brecht, Arman, César, Bill Viola, Anish Kapoor, Wim Delvoye, Yves Klein, Niki de Saint-Phalle, Yaacov Agam, John Cage, Cindy Sherman, Dieter Roth, Roy Lichtenstein, Burhan Dogancay, Nam June Paik, Wolf Vostell, Gilbert & George, David Hockney, Louise Bourgeois, Art & Language. Works of architecture and design include Philippe Starck, Jean Nouvel, Dominique Perrault. Since 2013: Bernard Blistène 2000 – 2013: Alfred Pacquement 1997 – 2000: Werner Spies 1992 – 1997: Germain Viatte 1991 – 1992: Dominique Bozo 1987 – 1991: Jean-Hubert Martin 1986 – 1987: Bernard Ceysson 1981 – 1986: Dominique Bozo 1973 – 1981: Pontus Hultén 1968 – 1973: Jean Leymarie 1965 – 1968: Bernard Dorival 1945 – 1965: Jean Cassou 1941 – 1944: Pierre Ladoué 1940: Jean Cassou Collection online Official website of the Museum Official website of the Centre Pompidou Official website of the Centre Pompidou-Metz provincial branch
De Stijl
De Stijl, Dutch for "The Style" known as Neoplasticism, was a Dutch art movement founded in 1917 in Leiden. De Stijl consisted of architects. In a narrower sense, the term De Stijl is used to refer to a body of work from 1917 to 1931 founded in the Netherlands. Proponents of De Stijl advocated pure abstraction and universality by a reduction to the essentials of form and colour. De Stijl is the name of a journal, published by the Dutch painter, designer and critic Theo van Doesburg that served to propagate the group's theories. Along with van Doesburg, the group's principal members were the painters Piet Mondrian, Vilmos Huszár, Bart van der Leck, the architects Gerrit Rietveld, Robert van't Hoff, J. J. P. Oud; the artistic philosophy that formed a basis for the group's work is known as Neoplasticism—the new plastic art. According to Theo van Doesburg in the introduction of the magazine "De Stijl" 1917 no.1, the "De Stijl"-movement was a reaction to the "Modern Baroque" of the Amsterdam School movement with the magazine "Wendingen".
Mondrian sets forth the delimitations of Neoplasticism in his essay "Neo-Plasticism in Pictorial Art". He writes, "this new plastic idea will ignore the particulars of appearance, to say, natural form and colour. On the contrary, it should find its expression in the abstraction of form and colour, to say, in the straight line and the defined primary colour". With these constraints, his art allows only primary colours and non-colours, only squares and rectangles, only straight and horizontal or vertical lines; the De Stijl movement posited the fundamental principle of the geometry of the straight line, the square, the rectangle, combined with a strong asymmetricality. The name De Stijl is derived from Gottfried Semper's Der Stil in den technischen und tektonischen Künsten oder Praktische Ästhetik, which Curl suggests was mistakenly believed to advocate materialism and functionalism; the "plastic vision" of De Stijl artists called Neo-Plasticism, saw itself as reaching beyond the changing appearance of natural things to bring an audience into intimate contact with an immutable core of reality, a reality, not so much a visible fact as an underlying spiritual vision.
In general, De Stijl proposed ultimate simplicity and abstraction, both in architecture and painting, by using only straight horizontal and vertical lines and rectangular forms. Furthermore, their formal vocabulary was limited to the primary colours, red and blue, the three primary values, black and grey; the works attained aesthetic balance by the use of opposition. This element of the movement embodies the second meaning of stijl: "a post, jamb or support". In many of the group's three-dimensional works and horizontal lines are positioned in layers or planes that do not intersect, thereby allowing each element to exist independently and unobstructed by other elements; this feature can be found in the Red and Blue Chair. De Stijl was influenced by Cubist painting as well as by the mysticism and the ideas about "ideal" geometric forms in the neoplatonic philosophy of mathematician M. H. J. Schoenmaekers; the De Stijl movement was influenced by Neopositivism. The works of De Stijl would influence the Bauhaus style and the international style of architecture as well as clothing and interior design.
However, it did not follow the general guidelines of an "-ism", nor did it adhere to the principles of art schools like the Bauhaus. In music, De Stijl was an influence only on the work of composer Jakob van Domselaer, a close friend of Mondrian. Between 1913 and 1916, he composed his Proeven van Stijlkunst, inspired by Mondrian's paintings; this minimalistic—and, at the time, revolutionary—music defined "horizontal" and "vertical" musical elements and aimed at balancing those two principles. Van Domselaer was unknown in his lifetime, did not play a significant role within De Stijl. From the flurry of new art movements that followed the Impressionist revolutionary new perception of painting, Cubism arose in the early 20th century as an important and influential new direction. In the Netherlands, there was interest in this "new art". However, because the Netherlands remained neutral in World War I, Dutch artists were not able to leave the country after 1914 and were thus isolated from the international art world—and in particular, from Paris, its centre then.
During that period, Theo van Doesburg started looking for other artists to set up a journal and start an art movement. Van Doesburg was a writer and critic, more successful writing about art than working as an independent artist. Quite adept at making new contacts due to his flamboyant personality and outgoing nature, he had many useful connections in the art world. Around 1915, Van Doesburg started meeting the artists who would become the founders of the journal, he first met Piet Mondrian at an exhibition in Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. Mondrian, who had moved to Paris in 1912, had be
Jacques Lipchitz
Jacques Lipchitz was a Cubist sculptor. Lipchitz retained figurative and legible components in his work leading up to 1915–16, after which naturalist and descriptive elements were muted, dominated by a synthetic style of Crystal Cubism. In 1920 Lipchitz held his first solo exhibition, at Léonce Rosenberg's Galerie L'Effort Moderne in Paris. Fleeing the Nazis he moved to the US and settled in New York City and Hastings-on-Hudson. Jacques Lipchitz was born Chaim Jacob Lipschitz, in a Litvak family, son of a building contractor in Druskininkai, Lithuania within the Russian Empire. At first, under the influence of his father, he studied engineering, but soon after, supported by his mother he moved to Paris to study at the École des Beaux-Arts and the Académie Julian, it was there, in the artistic communities of Montmartre and Montparnasse, that he joined a group of artists that included Juan Gris and Pablo Picasso as well as where his friend, Amedeo Modigliani, painted Jacques and Berthe Lipchitz.
Living in this environment, Lipchitz soon began to create Cubist sculpture. In 1912 he exhibited at the Salon de la Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts and the Salon d'Automne with his first solo show held at Léonce Rosenberg's Galerie L'Effort Moderne in Paris in 1920. In 1922 he was commissioned by the Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pennsylvania to execute seven bas-reliefs and two sculptures. With artistic innovation at its height, in the 1920s he experimented with abstract forms he called transparent sculptures, he developed a more dynamic style, which he applied with telling effect to bronze compositions of figures and animals. In 1924-25 Lipchitz married Berthe Kirosser. With the German occupation of France during World War II, the deportation of Jews to the Nazi death camps, Lipchitz had to flee France. With the assistance of the American journalist Varian Fry in Marseille, he escaped the Nazi regime and went to the United States. There, he settled in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, he was one of 250 sculptors who exhibited in the Third Sculpture International Exhibition held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in the summer of 1949.
He has been identified among seventy of those sculptors in a photograph Life magazine published, taken at the exhibition. In 1954 a Lipchitz retrospective traveled from The Museum of Modern Art in New York to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and The Cleveland Museum of Art. In 1959, his series of small bronzes To the Limit of the Possible was shown at Fine Arts Associates in New York. In his years Lipchitz became more involved in his Jewish faith referring to himself as a "religious Jew" in an interview in 1970, he began abstaining from work on Shabbat and put on Tefillin daily, at the urging of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Schneerson. Beginning in 1963 he returned to Europe for several months of each year and worked in Pietrasanta, Italy, he developed a close friendship with Fiore de Henriquez. In 1972 his autobiography, co-authored with H. Harvard Arnason, was published on the occasion of an exhibition of his sculpture at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Jacques Lipchitz died in Italy.
His body was flown to Jerusalem for burial. His Tuscan Villa Bozio was donated to Chabad-Lubavitch in Italy and hosts an annual Jewish summer camp in its premises. "Sailor with Guitar" – 1914 "Drawing of a sculpture" – 1916 "Bather" – "Woman with Book" – at Carleton College "Bather, bronze" – 1923–25 "Reclining Nude with Guitar" –, a prime example of Cubism "Dancer with Veil" – "Dancer" – "The Song of the Vowels" –, – cast bronze sculptures at Cornell University, Princeton University, UCLA, Stanford University, Kykuit Estate Gardens, Paris "Bull and Condor" – "Bust of a Woman" – "David and Goliath" – "Embracing Figures" – "Prometheus Strangling the Vulture" – "Rescue II"- "Mother and Child" – at the Honolulu Museum of Art "Bellerophon Taming Pegasus: Large Version" –, begun in 1966 and arrived at Columbia Law School in pieces for assembly in 1977 "Peace on Earth" – "Government of the People" – Crystal Cubism Arnason H. Harvard and Jacques Lipchitz. My Life in Sculpture. New York: Viking Press, 1972.
Hammacher, Abraham Marie, Jacques Lipchitz, His Sculpture, New York, H. N. Abrams, 1961. Hope, Henry Radford, The Sculpture of Jacques Lipchitz, New York, Plantin press, printed for the trustees of the Museum of Modern Art, 1954. Lipchitz, Jacques, My Life in Sculpture, New York, Viking Press, 1972. Stott, Deborah A. Jacques Lipchitz and Cubism, New York, Garland Pub. 1978. Van Bork, Jacques Lipchitz, The Artist at Work, New York, Crown Publishers, 1966. Wilkinson, Alan G. Jacques Lipchitz, A Life in Sculpture, Canada, Art Gallery of Ontario, 1989. Works by or about Jacques Lipchitz at Internet Archive Jacques Lipchitz, Agence Photographique de la Réunion des musées nationaux et du Grand Palais des Champs-Elysées Bruce Bassett papers relating to Jacques Lipchitz, circa 1961–2001 from the Smithsonian Archives of American Art "Ask Jacques Lipchitz a Question: Jacques Lipchitz interviews during the summers of 1970–1972", Bruce W. Bassett and video producer; the Israel Museum, Jerusalem donated by Mr. Hanno D. Mott, New York for the family of Jacques Lipchitz.
Interactive online version published 2010 Lipchitz, Encyclopedia Treccani.it Jacques Lipchitz in American public collections, on the French Sculpture Census website
International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts
The International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts was a World's fair held in Paris, from April to October 1925. It was designed by the French government to highlight the new style moderne of architecture, interior decoration, glass and other decorative arts in Europe and throughout the world. Many ideas of the international avant-garde in the fields of architecture and applied arts were presented for the first time at the Exposition; the event took place between the esplanade of Les Invalides and the entrances of the Grand Palais and Petit Palais, on both banks of the Seine. There were 15,000 exhibitors from twenty different countries, it was visited by sixteen million people during its seven-month run; the Style Moderne presented at the Exposition became known as "Art Deco", after the name of the Exposition. The idea for an exhibition devoted the decorative arts came from the Société des Artistes Décorateurs, a group founded in 1901 which included both established artists, including Eugene Grasset and Hector Guimard, as well as younger artists including Francis Jourdain, Maurice Dufrêne, Paul Fallot and Pierre Chareau.
Decorative artists had been allowed to participate in the previous two Paris Salons, but they were placed subordinate to the painters, they wanted an exhibit which gave first place to decorative arts. The first Salons of the new group were held in the newly opened Museum of Decorative Arts in the Pavillon de Marsan of the Louvre; the Salon d'Automne, a new Salon founded in 1903, honored painters, graphics artists and architects, but again decorative arts were ignored. Frantz Jourdain announced the idea of holding a separate exhibit of decorative arts as soon as possible, he explained his reason in an essay written in 1928: "We resolved to return Decorative Art, inconsiderately treated as a Cinderella or poor relation allowed to eat with the servants, to the important preponderant place it occupied in the past, of all times and in all of the countries of the globe."The Society of Decorative Artists lobbied the French Chamber of Deputies, which in 1912 agreed to host an international exhibition of decorative arts in 1915.
The plans were put aside in 1915 because of the First World War revived after the war ended in 1918. It was first scheduled for 1922 postponed because of a shortage of construction materials to 1924 and 1925, twenty-five years after the great Paris Exposition of 1900; the program for the Exhibition made it clear that it was intended to be a celebration of modernism, not of historical styles. It was declared to be "open to all manufacturers whose products are artistic in character and show modern tendencies." The program stated that "Whatever the reputation of the artist, whatever the commercial strength of the manufacturer, neither will be allowed into the Exhibition if they do not fit the conditions outlined in the Exhibition program." A second purpose was attached to the Exhibition: to honor the Allied countries in the First World War. For this reason the new Soviet Union was invited, though its government was not yet recognized by France, while Germany was not; the United States declined to participate.
S. Secretary of Commerce, Herbert Hoover, explained that there was no modern art in the United States; the U. S. Commerce Department did appoint a commission to issue a report; the report, which came out in 1926, stated that the U. S had misunderstood the purpose of the Exposition, that at least some participation should have been arranged to honor the French-American wartime alliance. While the U. S. did not have a pavilion, hundreds of American designers, artists and department store buyers came to Paris to see the Exposition. The site chosen for the Exposition was the center of Paris, around the Grand Palais, the enormous glass and iron pavilion, built for the 1900 Paris Exposition; the principal architect was Charles Plumet. The main entrance, called the Gate of Honor, was located next to the Grand Palais; the main axis stretched from the Gate of Honor across the Pont Alexandre III to Les Invalides with pavilions on both banks, while gardens and fountains were placed between the pavilions. The Pont Alexander III, which connected the two parts of the Exposition, was turned into a modernist shopping mall by the architect Maurice Dufrêne.
The banks of the Seine were lined with floating restaurants built for the Exposition, which became a popular attraction. There were thirteen different gateways into the Exposition, which were each designed by a different architect; the main entrance was at the Place de la Concorde, designed by architect Pierre Patout, with a statue of a woman in the center called "Welcome" by Louis Dejean. The pavilions of the major French stores and decorators were located on the main axis within the entrance. Another section was devoted to pavilions from designers from the French provinces from Nancy and Lyon. Another section was devoted to foreign pavilions and manufacturers, another to the products of French colonies which could be used in decoration rare woods and products such as ivory and mother of pearl; the tallest structure in the Exposition, one of the most modernist, was the tower of the Tourism Pavilion by Robert Mallet-Stevens. The tower's sleek lines and lack of ornament were an announcement of the international style that would replace Art Deco.
In 1929 Mallet-Stevens led the creation of The French Union of Modern Artists which rebelled against the luxurious decorative styles shown at the Exposition, along with L
Fernand Léger
Joseph Fernand Henri Léger was a French painter and filmmaker. In his early works he created a personal form of cubism which he modified into a more figurative, populist style, his boldly simplified treatment of modern subject matter has caused him to be regarded as a forerunner of pop art. Léger was born in Argentan, Lower Normandy, where his father raised cattle. Fernand Léger trained as an architect from 1897 to 1899, before moving in 1900 to Paris, where he supported himself as an architectural draftsman. After military service in Versailles, Yvelines, in 1902–1903, he enrolled at the School of Decorative Arts after his application to the École des Beaux-Arts was rejected, he attended the Beaux-Arts as a non-enrolled student, spending what he described as "three empty and useless years" studying with Gérôme and others, while studying at the Académie Julian. He began to work as a painter only at the age of 25. At this point his work showed the influence of impressionism, as seen in Le Jardin de ma mère of 1905, one of the few paintings from this period that he did not destroy.
A new emphasis on drawing and geometry appeared in Léger's work after he saw the Cézanne retrospective at the Salon d'Automne in 1907. In 1909 he moved to Montparnasse and met Alexander Archipenko, Jacques Lipchitz, Marc Chagall, Joseph Csaky and Robert Delaunay. In 1910 he exhibited at the Salon d'Automne in the same room as Jean Metzinger and Henri Le Fauconnier. In his major painting of this period, Nudes in the Forest, Léger displays a personal form of Cubism that his critics termed "Tubism" for its emphasis on cylindrical forms. In 1911 the hanging committee of the Salon des Indépendants placed together the painters identified as'Cubists'. Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, Le Fauconnier, Delaunay and Léger were responsible for revealing Cubism to the general public for the first time as an organized group; the following year he again exhibited at the Salon d'Automne and Indépendants with the Cubists, joined with several artists, including Le Fauconnier, Gleizes, Francis Picabia and the Duchamp brothers, Jacques Villon, Raymond Duchamp-Villon and Marcel Duchamp to form the Puteaux Group—also called the Section d'Or.
Léger's paintings, from until 1914, became abstract. Their tubular and cubed forms are laconically rendered in rough patches of primary colors plus green and white, as seen in the series of paintings with the title Contrasting Forms. Léger made no use of the collage technique pioneered by Picasso. Léger's experiences in World War. Mobilized in August 1914 for service in the French Army, he spent two years at the front in Argonne, he produced many sketches of artillery pieces and fellow soldiers while in the trenches, painted Soldier with a Pipe while on furlough. In September 1916 he died after a mustard gas attack by the German troops at Verdun. During a period of convalescence in Villepinte he painted The Card Players, a canvas whose robot-like, monstrous figures reflect the ambivalence of his experience of war; as he explained:... I was stunned by the sight of the breech of a 75 millimeter in the sunlight, it was the magic of light on the white metal. That's all it took for me to forget the abstract art of 1912–1913.
The crudeness, variety and downright perfection of certain men around me, their precise sense of utilitarian reality and its application in the midst of the life-and-death drama we were in... made me want to paint in slang with all its color and mobility. This work marked the beginning of his "mechanical period", during which the figures and objects he painted were characterized by sleekly rendered tubular and machine-like forms. Starting in 1918, he produced the first paintings in the Disk series, in which disks suggestive of traffic lights figure prominently. In December 1919 he married Jeanne-Augustine Lohy, in 1920 he met Le Corbusier, who would remain a lifelong friend; the "mechanical" works Léger painted in the 1920s, in their formal clarity as well as in their subject matter—the mother and child, the female nude, figures in an ordered landscape—are typical of the postwar "return to order" in the arts, link him to the tradition of French figurative painting represented by Poussin and Corot.
In his paysages animés of 1921, figures and animals exist harmoniously in landscapes made up of streamlined forms. The frontal compositions, firm contours, smoothly blended colors of these paintings recall the works of Henri Rousseau, an artist Léger admired and whom he had met in 1909, they share traits with the work of Le Corbusier and Amédée Ozenfant who together had founded Purism, a style intended as a rational, mathematically based corrective to the impulsiveness of cubism. Combining the classical with the modern, Léger's Nude on a Red Background depicts a monumental, expressionless woman, machinelike in form and color, his still life compositions from this period are dominated by stable, interlocking rectangular formations in vertical and horizontal orientation. The Siphon of 1924, a still life based on an advertisement in the popular press for the aperitif Campari, represents the high-water mark of the Purist aesthetic in Léger's work, its balanced composition and fluted shapes suggestive of classical columns are brought together with a quasi-cinematic close-up of a hand holding a bottle.
As an enthusiast of the modern, Léger was attracted to cinema, for a time he considered giving up painting for filmmaking. In 1923–24 he designed the set for the laboratory scene in Marcel L'Herbier's L
Section d'Or
The Section d'Or known as Groupe de Puteaux, was a collective of painters, sculptors and critics associated with Cubism and Orphism. Based in the Parisian suburbs, the group held regular meetings at the home of the Duchamp brothers in Puteaux and at the studio of Albert Gleizes in Courbevoie. Active from 1911 to around 1914, members of the collective came to prominence in the wake of their controversial showing at the Salon des Indépendants in the spring of 1911; this showing by Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger, Robert Delaunay, Henri le Fauconnier, Fernand Léger and Marie Laurencin, created a scandal that brought Cubism to the attention of the general public for the first time. The Salon de la Section d'Or, held October 1912—the largest and most important public showing of Cubist works prior to World War I—exposed Cubism to a wider audience still. After the war, with support given by the dealer Léonce Rosenberg, Cubism returned to the front line of Parisian artistic activity. Various elements of the Groupe de Puteaux would mount two more large-scale Section d'Or exhibitions, in 1920 and in 1925, with the goal of revealing the complete process of transformation and renewal that had transpired since the onset of Cubism.
The group seems to have adopted the name "Section d'Or" as both an homage to the mathematical harmony associated with Georges Seurat, to distinguish themselves from the narrower style of Cubism developed in parallel by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque in the Montmartre quarter of Paris. In addition, the name was to highlight that Cubism, rather than being an isolated art-form, represented the continuation of a grand tradition: indeed, the golden ratio, or golden section had fascinated Western intellectuals of diverse interests for at least 2,400 years; the Puteaux Group organized their first exhibition under the name Salon de la Section d'Or at the Galerie La Boétie in Paris, October 1912. Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger, in preparation for the Salon de la Section d'Or, published a major defense of Cubism, resulting in the first theoretical essay on the new movement, entitled Du "Cubisme". Following the 1911 Salon exhibitions the group formed by Le Fauconnier, Gleizes, Léger and R. Delaunay expanded to include several other artists.
František Kupka had lived in Puteaux for several years in the same complex as Jacques Villon. Francis Picabia was introduced to the circle by Guillaume Apollinaire with whom he had become friendly. Most was the contact established with Metzinger and the Duchamp brothers, who exhibited under the names of Jacques Villon, Marcel Duchamp and Duchamp-Villon; the opening address was given by Apollinaire. The participation of many of these artists in the formation of Les Artistes de Passy in October 1912 was an attempt to transform the Passy district of Paris into yet another art-centre; the idea of the Section d'Or originated in the course of conversations between Gleizes and Jacques Villon. The group's title was suggested by Villon, after reading a 1910 translation of Leonardo da Vinci's Trattato della Pittura by Joséphin Péladan. Peladan attached great mystical significance to the golden section, other similar geometric configurations. For Villon, this symbolized his belief in order and the significance of mathematical proportions, because it reflected patterns and relationships occurring in nature.
Jean Metzinger and the Duchamp brothers were passionately interested in mathematics. Jean Metzinger, Juan Gris and Marcel Duchamp at this time were associates of Maurice Princet, an amateur mathematician credited for introducing profound and rational scientific arguments into Cubist discussions; the name La Section d'Or represented a continuity with past traditions and current trends in related fields, while leaving open future developments in the arts. Art historian Daniel Robbins argued that in addition to referencing the mathematical golden section, the term associated with the Salon Cubists refers to the name of the earlier Bandeaux d'Or group, with which Albert Gleizes and other former members of the Abbaye de Créteil had been involved; the 1912 Salon de la Section d'Or was arguably the most important pre-World War. In the previous year the Cubists and a large number of their associates had exhibited at the Galerie de l'Art Contemporain under the auspices of the Société Normande de Peinture Moderne.
This exhibition had received some attention in the press, though due to the diversity of the works presented it had been referred to as an exposition des fauves et cubistes. The Salon de la Section d'Or, was accepted as being Cubist in nature. Over 200 works were displayed, the fact that many of the artists showed artworks representative of their development from 1909 to 1912 gave the exhibition the allure of a Cubist retrospective. Though the Salle 41 Cubists had been surprised by the impassioned reactions generated by the 1911 Salon des Indépendants showing, they appear to have been eager to attract as much attention as possible with the Salon de la Section d'Or; the inauguration was held from nine until midnight, for which the onl
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