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The Heroic Object and
Fernand Léger
Suppose the faithful
Marmon or Velie, that’s been in the family for generations, breaks down in the
hills above Figeac, and you coast into town and a helpful routier gives
you a push into the one garage. Does the mechanic tell you to get rid of that
piece of junk? Does he look in vain through his strictly up-to-date Motor
Manual? Does he tell you he can’t fix it? He does not. He whistles through his
teeth, rolls a cigarette, then asks you wistfully for an American cigarette,
lights it with profuse thanks, opens the hood, detaches the dodecahedron
polymerizer from the reciprocating cam, smiles brightly, says, “Ah, m’sieu,
c’est la bonne chance, ce fait rien,” and proceeds to make another one, better
than the first, using no manuals of any kind and only a pliers and a file.
There are not fifty
million mechanics like him, but there are a considerable number, and if it
weren’t for them France would not be in existence today, and would certainly not
have survived the years since 1870. Léger is one of them. He is the man who
knows what to do when it breaks, the man who can always make it go.
After the first painting
of his apprentice days, he is always completely competent to the task at hand.
He knows what he wants to do, and he does it with a machinist’s efficiency. It
is possible that the tasks he has set himself are not the most complex in the
history of painting, but each one is conceived with complete clarity and economy
and finished with neatness and dispatch. In fact, it might well be said that
Léger’s directness has bypassed all those problems of modern painting which are
not immediately demonstrable as admitting a simple, rational solution, a
manipulative rather than a mentalistic, verbal, expressive solution. It should
not be forgotten, in these days when Husserl, Heidegger, and Scheler rule the
café terasses, that this used to be called the specific French genius.
And, for that matter, even the bagarre of Saint-Germain is only a
formalistic and Tedescan elaboration of attitudes always held in Puteaux or
Saint-Denis.
The matter-of-fact
competence in the face of life’s problems which the French common man has always
had, must have or go under, did not need a name from the International Set.
Everybody in France who doesn’t own five pairs of shoes has always been an
existentialist. And so, if they want him, Léger is an existentialist painter. An
existentialist of the means at hand. An existentialist without a capital E. Such
were the men of the seventeenth century, who made the French spirit out of
mathematical models and devices for tracing complex curves, over which the
countesses and courtesans swooned in the salons. Such was Racine, expert
campanologist of the heart strings, supremely efficient tear-jerker. Such was
Rimbaud, the child who applied to decadence the efficiency of a future
gunrunner.
We often forget that of
the major Cubists, only Braque and Léger are French. Between them they divide
the Gallic utterance of Cubism, soft and hard, feminine and masculine, ingenious
and manipulative, the midinette and the mechanicien, the chef and
the peasant. The rest of Cubism is international megalopolitan, except for
Picasso’s Black Spain of blood and sand.
This is not idle
impressionist, exhortative criticism. The qualities which I have mentioned
literally overwhelm you in Léger’s comprehensive — better, definitive — show
[the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1953]. In room after room the vast
paintings take possession of you. You feel like a character in science fiction,
a spectator at a congress of intelligent outsized instruments of precision.
There is nothing abstract about these pictures. They are portraits of things, of
a man, and of a people.
A lot of nonsense, very
plastic, has been written and said about Léger, not least of all by himself.
Nothing illustrates the fortuitous character of most critical “modern” seeing
than the way in which he has been invested, and has been able to garb himself,
with the whole panoply of the contemporary formal revolution, or revolutions.
Léger is one of the few artists left who still talk about passéistes,
Renaissance servility to Nature, “photographic realism,” the Greeks who could
only copy anatomy. Actually, he is not a modern painter at all in the formal
sense, but a man of the Renaissance, a composer of objects in representational
space, and a Greek of the Greeks, or at least a Roman of the Romans, a painter
of isolated human archetypes.
It shows in his first
paintings: a portrait of his uncle, modeled up from a shallow indeterminate
background with broken color, Pissarro applied to Carrière; a hillside in
Corsica, ochre houses and terre verte trees piled up on a hillside like
fruit heaped on a platter and seen from above, a problem and a solution which
were to satisfy Waroquier for a lifetime. In both pictures the technique is that
of an apprentice, but for all that, Léger is perfectly sure of himself even in
his mistakes, and the surfaces are certainly modeled. When the uncle was new and
the colors bright, he must have more than popped out of the picture.
The next pictures are in
what is usually called the African period of Cubism, and it is at this point
only that Léger actually joins Picasso and Braque. Nudes in the Forest is
a minutely painted large canvas completely filled with cubes, tubes, cylinders,
and cones of gunmetal blue. It takes Cézanne’s injunction literally. The forms
of nature are reduced to their geometrical elements. But the elements are
represented literally. There is no ambiguity, no interplay of forms. Compare it
with Picabia’s Sacre du Printemps — probably the best picture any of
them produced in this period (the Picassos and Braques are very disagreeable
productions) — and you will see immediately what I mean. In the Picabia, a
blaze of scarlet planes does define the dancers, but no plane stays in place,
all weave back and forth, facets first of one form shaped by the attention, then
of another. The Léger begins in Mantegna and ends in Wyndham Lewis, and never
touches the world of Cubism at all.
Similarly in the heroic
age of Cubism, the analytical period, only the appearance of the paintings of
the other Cubists is echoed. The picture surface is completely fragmented into a
flicker of values. But the flicker is not the result of the transparencies,
interpenetrations, and plastic punning of the Guitar Players and
portraits of Bass’s Ale and Le Journal; there is no attempt to create a
saturation of space; it is simply filled up with a lot of little sharply rounded
objects. Incidentally, the catalog says that the portrait of his uncle is the
only representation of an actual person known in Léger’s oeuvre. If the
people in Three Figures are not portraits, what are they? One is
certainly Carco, the woman might be a caricature of Colette of those days, the
other face is a masterpiece of portraiture. The grin, sardonic and jolly, even a
little tipsy, is the sort of thing you find in self-portraits, but I think Léger
had a mustache then.
All the paintings of the
analytical period have the same character. The space is filled up, rather than
saturated. The planes all stay in one place, the forms are sharply modeled, the
“Cubism” itself is merely a geometrical schematization. This is a kind of
popular Cubism, a mechanic’s idea of what the problem was. As such, it was far
more successful than Picasso, Braque, Metzinger, or Gleizes with the public, at
least the public of artists around the world. It spread to Italy to the
Cubo-Futurists, to Russia, to Chicago to Rudolf Weisenborn, to England to
Wyndham Lewis and Wadsworth and their friends. At its worst it died over the
mirrors of a thousand Bar Modernes in the postwar (I) world.
Léger’s highly articulate
remarks about his intentions in these days are very misleading. Of Woman in
Blue he says, “I obtained rectangles of pure blue and pure red in painting
the Woman in Blue.” So? Raphael obtained triangles of the same colors in
the Madonna of the Meadow. Both painters modeled their forms in the same
way, and, Léger to the contrary, “Passéiste” and Modernist, for the
same ends, aesthetically speaking.
It is interesting to note
that in the more ambitious analytical paintings Léger does seem to be bothered
by the bas-relief, piled-up character of his space, and he does try to open it
up and cut into it. But to do this he must paint representations of recessions
— carved-out slices and corridors, and the steplike figure which from now on he
will use again and again. He carries them over into a field in which no one else
used them, the postwar period of plane Cubism, of Picasso’s Red Table Cloth,
Braque’s Still Life with Head, and the finest work of Gris and
Marcoussis, a period dominated by the theories of Gleizes.
The great Léger of these
days is The City. It is, without doubt, a monumental picture, a landmark
if not a milestone, in twentieth-century painting, and it is represented in the
show by eight or ten different treatments, including the definitive and
semi-definitive oils, and a number of closely related watercolor still lifes.
Here at last we can see that Léger is not the Douanier of Cubism, he is not a
naïf, a primitive. He knows precisely what he is doing. The earliest
watercolors, and the painting, Composition, 1917-1918, 97 × 71½, are
perfectly straightforward arrangements of planes in bas-relief, piled up toward
the spectator — that is, the center plane is the nearest. There is some
illusionist modeling, mostly in the oil, only a cylinder in the watercolors.
There is a great deal of spiraling movement of form transversely, in the plane
of the picture, and even some advance and retreat of planes, all achieved
primarily by centrifugal patterning and color snap, by what were called
non-illusionist means. They might have been painted by Gleizes in a lively
moment.
But when it comes to the
painting itself, the final form, all have been subtly altered. The colors are
tied to the forms — local colors — the nearest plane is defined by a sharply
modeled mauve column which cuts the picture in extreme and mean ratio; behind it
two yellow planes recede in conventional perspective, planes of buildings, all
brightly colored “for their own sake,” recede like stage sets. In the
background is a ship; railed staircases lead back in a narrow corridor through
the center of the picture, and down them, to complete the illusion, come two
black, sharply modeled figures, relatives of the lay figures of Chirico. This
may be Cubism but it is not the Cubism of Léger’s colleagues. It is the Cubism
of Piero della Francesca, perhaps a little reduced. It is as though Léger had
deliberately turned his back on the complexities of Gleizes and Gris as trivial.
Once again we have a
rejection of the plastic subtleties of intellectual painters in favor of an
approach capable of a wide measure of popularization. Out of the work of this
period, especially the still lifes, was to come the Suprematism of Ozenfant,
some of the Bauhaus painters, particularly Baumeister, and the whole cult of
antiseptic modernity in popular art.
The City has
already taken a long step in this direction. What city? Possibly a modernized
Delft of Vermeer, certainly never the Faubourg St. Antoine, the Marais, or La
Villette. This is the imaginary city of the movies and the urbanists.
For this reason alone I
would prefer, of this period, Léger’s The Great Tug, a vaguely nautical
Gleizes-like mass of colored planes which chooches and chugs through a
schematized river landscape. Of course it is a complete contradiction. The
“Neo-Cubism” of Léger’s colleagues set out to analyze exhaustively the picture
area in terms of large planes of color, the surfaces of saturated color volumes,
optically retreating and advancing in space. Now this is what Léger says he was
doing too. But he was doing nothing of the sort. The tug, the central mass of
colored planes, is an object, an abstract object, like a Calder, but
representationally though simply painted, and it does not depend on the
proportions of the frame directly. On the contrary, it floats in a space which
differs little from the background of Piero’s Queen of Sheba.
Now come the mid-Twenties
and Léger’s own revolution, “the reinstatement of the object.” In other words,
he decided to admit what he had been doing all along, and stopped trying to make
his paintings look even superficially like other people’s. For my taste, these
are the best Légers until very recent years. They are completely individual.
They look like nobody else, though lots of other painters try to look like them.
And they achieve what Léger can do best, and achieve it superlatively — a
wonderful objective immediacy of realization, a true neue-süchlichkeit —
“Neo-realism” maybe, but the French already had a word for it — clarté.
Boucher had a clear image like this of La Petite Morphi, as Chardin had
of pots and pans, and Diderot of Louis XV, and Saint-Just of Louis XVI. This is
the virtue that has kept France great, as once it made her strong.
This is the period of the
heroic human figures, beginning with the Mechanic and the Three Women,
including Woman with Book and The Readers. They have been called
impersonal abstractions. But they are abstractions only in the sense that Hans
and Fritz and Mama and the Captain are abstractions. They are perfect
idealizations of universal French types. They have been compared to Poussin, but
they are certainly very shallow Poussin. To me they look more like Roman
funerary bas-relief, and they have the same archetypical character as the best
Roman portraiture. After them come the medallion-like pictures of the late
Twenties, most of them rather wittily, and certainly very originally,
bifurcated. I like best The Mirror, and it is certainly typical, in its
wit, its polish, its enormous self-confidence. Now the craftsman knows his craft
by heart. It is his heart. His highest spiritual experience is the sense of
absolute competence in the face of the problems of the conquest of matter.
Cubism, and the problems of modern space architecture, are ignored completely.
These are not even bas-reliefs, they are cameos.
So, the next period — of
“free color,” by which Léger does not mean dissociated color moving as color
volume, but just free color, applied as it struck his fancy; and “free form,”
that is, painting built without a base, floating in air. In part, this latter
development is a protest against Picasso, whose compositions all depend on their
enormous specific gravity. But Léger’s forms do not really float in the “free
space” of the space cadets and the Baroque ceilings. They revolve around a
center, without top or bottom, like medals — still the same approach. Although
the besetting has-relief is attacked by reducing much of the form to purely
linear relationships, they are never the linear swoops and plunges of either
Sesshu or Tiepolo. They are always exactly there where the painter put them. I
think, curiously enough, the most successful is not the famous The Divers,
but the quite simple Chinese Juggler.
During this period, too,
Léger was developing his alphabet of human types. It was then he began — to
work on it for nineteen years — his Three Musicians, three numeros
from a bal musette, the Fourteenth of July on the Boulevard La Chapelle.
It is an independently conceived and painted picture, but no one could miss the
implied criticism of Picasso’s internationalized, déracinés, Ballet Russe
ogres.
And this brings us to the
culmination, paintings of pure human archetypes, very human, very pure, and very
localized to a class and a land, as is Léger himself. In a way the
accomplishment of Léger’s later life is not unlike that of William Butler Yeats,
who was able to achieve in his old age a whole heroic mythos, the kind of an
endowment only a Heroic Age gives most peoples, for the ungrateful Irish.
Leisure, The Great Julie, The Chinese Juggler, and the rest are close to
being Platonic Ideas of the French common people. If you doubt it, ponder
Adam and Eve, represented as hero and heroine of the théâtre de foire,
snake charmers, street performers such as you might see any sultry August, in a
neighborhood place anywhere in France, the immortal parents of Little Remi,
Vitalis, and their dogs and the monkey, Joli-Coeur.
And finally, there is the
great picture, The Builders, on whose title and subject many
philosophical and sociological speculations and reveries might be based. These
are the builders of France, after another time, out of so many years of war,
disorder, and betrayal. And plastically Léger has moved on a little. The space
is deep and open, with interchanging diagonals. One is reminded of Signorelli,
but a Signorelli in which all the figures are standing at attention. It may be
Egypt applied to the High Renaissance. But neither Egypt nor the High
Renaissance produced a great many more profoundly moving pictures of human
beings.
KENNETH REXROTH
1953
This essay originally
appeared in Art News (October 1953) and was reprinted in Bird in the
Bush (New Directions, 1959). Copyright 1959. Reproduced here by permission
of the Kenneth Rexroth Trust.
[Other Rexroth Essays]
[REXROTH ARCHIVE]
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