Fernand Léger


Book Description










Fernand Léger


Book Description

Fernand Leger (1881-1955) is the only modern artist to choose modernity itself as his subject. From his early series Contrastes de formes (1913-14), the first fully abstract works to emerge from Cubism, through his last realistic paintings of construction workers from the early 1950s, Leger's lifelong subject was the pulse and dynamism of contemporary life.







Cubism


Book Description

This beautifully illustrated volume tells the story of Cubism through twenty-two essays that explore the most significant private holding of Cubist art in the world today, the Leonard A. Lauder Collection, now a promised gift to The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The eighty works featured in this volume—by Georges Braque, Juan Gris, Fernand Léger, and Pablo Picasso‐are among the most important and visually arresting in the movement’s history. These masterpieces, critical to the development of Cubism, include such groundbreaking paintings as Braque’s Trees at L’Estaque, considered one of the very first Cubist pictures; Picasso’s Still Life with Fan: “L’Indépendant,” one of the first to introduce typography; Gris’s noirish, uncanny The Man at the Café, one of his most celebrated collages; and Léger’s uniquely ambitious Composition (The Typographer). Written by renowned experts on this subject, the essays trace the evolution of Cubism from its origins in the still lifes, portraits, and collages of Braque and Picasso through the precisely delineated compositions by Gris that prefigure the Synthetic Cubism of the war years to Léger’s distinctive intersections of spherical, cylindrical, and cubic forms that evoke the syncopated rhythms of modern life. Also included are a fascinating interview in which Leonard Lauder discusses his approach to collecting, an investigative essay on the information gleaned from the backs of the works themselves, and an authoritative catalogue that further establishes the lives of these magnificent objects. A publication to place alongside the great histories of Modernism, this comprehensive book will stand as the resource for understanding Cubism for many years to come. -




A Century of Artists Books


Book Description

Published to accompany the 1994 exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, this book constitutes the most extensive survey of modern illustrated books to be offered in many years. Work by artists from Pierre Bonnard to Barbara Kruger and writers from Guillaume Apollinarie to Susan Sontag. An importnt reference for collectors and connoisseurs. Includes notable works by Marc Chagall, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso.




Fernand Léger


Book Description

"The goal should be an understanding by all three parties: the wall, the architect and the painter", observed the French artist Fernand Léger (1881-1955) in 1933. His projects reveal a willingness to try out new things and demonstrate his striving to extend painting beyond the boundaries of the easel and to integrate it into the social, everyday space. They shed new light on one of the influential artists of the twentieth century. Fernand Léger, known for his Cubist paintings and his representational works of the mechanical period, was a trained architectural draughtsman who from the early 1920s until the end of his life made an intensive study of the interrelationships between painting and space. He was convinced that the social and psychological dimension in the use of colour contributed to a better integration of modern architecture into everyday life and human existence. In close dialogue with architects like Wallace K. Harrison and Le Corbusier he produced fascinating, often unexpectedly experimental and frequently abstract projects for houses, flats, churches, ships and world exhibitions.




Inventing Abstraction, 1910-1925


Book Description

This book explores the development of abstraction from the moment of its declaration around 1912 to its establishment as the foundation of avant-garde practice in the mid-1920s. The book brings together many of the most influential works in abstractions early history to draw a cross-media portrait of this watershed moment in which traditional art was reinvented in a wholesale way. Works are presented in groups that serve as case studies, each engaging a key topic in abstractions first years: an artist, a movement, an exhibition or thematic concern. Key focal points include Vasily Kandinskys ambitious Compositions V, VI and VII; a selection of Piet Mondrians work that offers a distilled narrative of his trajectory to Neo-plasticism; and all the extant Suprematist pictures that Kazimir Malevich showed in the landmark 0.10 exhibition in 1915.0Exhibition: MoMA, New York, USA (23.12.2012-15.4.2013).




Modern Art Despite Modernism


Book Description

Essay by Robert Storr. Foreword by Glenn D. Lowry.