"I wanted brightness and intensity, so I used the machine, as others use the nude or the still life.", Fernand Léger
Fernand Léger (February 4, 1881 – August 17, 1955) was a French painter, sculptor, muralist, and filmmaker, and one of the major figures of twentieth-century European modernism. Born in Argentan, in Lower Normandy, into a cattle-farming family, he trained as an architect from 1897 to 1899 and moved to Paris in 1900, supporting himself initially as an architectural draftsman. After early experiments mixing Impressionist and Fauvist approaches, his encounter with the Cubism of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque pushed him toward his own distinctive abstraction, a style centered on cylindrical, mechanical forms that quickly earned the nickname "Tubism."
Across his long career he developed a singular vocabulary built around modern industrial subjects, robot-like human figures, and bold flat color, becoming one of the artists most closely associated with the visual culture of twentieth-century industry. His 1924 collaboration Ballet Mécanique, made with the filmmaker Dudley Murphy and scored by George Antheil, remains a landmark of avant-garde cinema; his 1935 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art consolidated his reputation in the United States, where he later spent much of the Second World War; and the murals he installed in the General Assembly Hall of the United Nations headquarters in New York in 1952 stand as a rare twentieth-century example of major modernist painting in a global civic interior. He was made a Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur, and his work is held in the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim, the Tate, the Centre Pompidou, and the Musée National Fernand Léger in Biot, the only museum in the world dedicated solely to his work, with a collection of more than three hundred paintings, sculptures, ceramics, and mosaics.