EXHIBITION EXAMINES A MASTERPIECE BY FERNAND LÉGER IN CONTEXT Léger: Modern Art and the Metropolis October 14, 2013 - January 5, 2014

Returning to Paris after military service in World War I, the French painter Fernand Léger (1881– 1955) encountered a changed city, infused with a new boisterous energy that would inspire him to create one of his landmark achievements, the monumental painting The City (1919). The creation of this work signaled the beginning of the most experimental period in Léger’s work, lasting through the 1920s, when the artist challenged and redeined the practice of painting by bringing it into active engagement with the urban popular and commercial arts. Léger: Modern Art and the Metropolis will examine the centrality of this masterpiece in Léger’s career and the European avant- garde in the years immediately after World War I. Comprising approximately 160 works, including loans from public and private collections in Europe and the United States, this multimedia exhibition will unite The City with other important paintings from this period by Léger, and with key works in ilm, theater design, graphic and advertising design, and architecture by the artist and his avant-garde colleagues, including Piet Mondrian, Theo van Doesburg, Cassandre, Amédée Ozenfant, Le Corbusier, Francis Picabia, Alexandra Exter, Gerald Murphy, and others.

“Léger’s The City, donated to the Museum by the artist and collector A.E. Gallatin, is one of the greatest works in our collection and a landmark in the history of modern art,” notes Timothy Rub, the George D. Widener Director and Chief Executive Oficer of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. “This exhibition examines this painting in context and marks the irst time that the culture of the modern metropolis is explored as a catalyst for Léger’s pursuits in a variety of media.”

In the United States, the exhibition will be seen only in Philadelphia. Following its presentation at the Museum, it will travel to Venice where it will be on view at the Correr Museum in the Piazza San Marco. (To conirm).

The City was a threshold work in Léger’s oeuvre. A monumental painting in a post-Cubist style, it was intended by the artist to convey viscerally the density and spatial complexity of the urban environment. Léger considered The City a “mural” painting both because of its grand scale and because he believed it spoke to a mass audience. With its composition characterized by montage- like cross-cuts from one scene to the next and dramatic “close-ups,” The City emulated the most popular of modern urban entertainments, the cinema. Starting with The City, Léger’s paintings likewise emulated, rather than illustrated, distinctive features of urban visual culture: his paintings acquired the formal qualities of street signs or billboards, frames of a ilm, theatrical backdrops, or walls of buildings. Léger also expanded his range of production into ilmmaking, theater design, graphic design, and mural decoration, while at the same time his avant-garde friends and collaborators—artists, poets, architects, and ilmmakers—were also seeking new social relevance by taking inspiration from the urban popular arts and the metropolitan environment. The exhibition will be organized thematically to relect the fertile relationships between painting and urban culture during this period. The irst section of the exhibition will examine the notion of “publicity” and the excitement Léger felt for the evolving visual language of mass communication in the city: the bustle of billboards, trafic signs, and shop window displays. Léger’s paintings, his designs for advertising posters, and his print illustrations will be seen alongside work by other artists and designers, such as Gerald Murphy, Cassandre, and Jean Carlu. The exhibition will also explore Léger’s interest in public entertainment and staged performance, mainly the theater and cinema, highlighting the set and costume designs produced by Léger for ilm and ballet. This part of the exhibition will survey avant-garde activities around cinema and the stage, and include works by Francis Picabia, Alexandra Exter, Georgii Yakoulov, and others. The exhibition’s inal section will address the theme of “space” by presenting the artist’s abstract mural compositions of the mid-1920s, intended as decorative architectural panels, in the context of the avant-garde’s exploration of integrating architectural and pictorial space. This section of the exhibition will include works by artists, architects, and designers such as Piet Mondrian, Theo van Doesburg, Robert Mallet-Stevens, Alexander Archipenko and Le Corbusier.

“For many artists, the metropolis imposed a new way of seeing and demanded new practices of artmaking,”comments exhibition curator Anna Vallye, the Museum’s Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow in Modern and Contemporary Art. “It inspired Léger to probe the boundaries between the arts, and between ine art and common culture.”

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue published by the Philadelphia Museum of Art in collaboration with Yale University Press. Featuring essays by scholars of art, architecture, and ilm history, a selection of historical texts by Léger and others not previously published in English, and more than 250 full-color illustrations, the catalogue conveys the experimental spirit of the 1920s.

A wide range of public programming will accompany the exhibition, including lectures, activities for families with children, a ilm series, music performances, and a scholarly conference. A full schedule will be available on the Museum’s website at a later date.

Léger: Modern Art and the Metropolis is generously supported by The Women’s Committee of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the National Endowment for the Arts, The Annenberg Foundation for Major Exhibitions, and Sotheby’s.

The catalogue is made possible by The Andrew W. Mellon Fund for Scholarly Publications at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and by Furthermore: a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund.

About Fernand Léger The son of a cattle farmer, Léger was born in Argentan, Orne, Basse-Normandie, in 1881. From 1897-1899, he trained as an architect and in 1900 he moved to Paris where he became an architectural draftsman. After military service, in1902–1903, he enrolled at the School of Decorative Arts while also attending classes at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and studying at the Académie Julian. Léger began painting seriously at the age of 25. His early work was inluenced by Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. In 1909 Léger moved to Montparnasse, where he met leaders of the artistic avant-garde including Alexander Archipenko, Jacques Lipchitz, Marc Chagall, and Robert Delaunay. In 1910 Léger and several other artists, including Marcel Duchamp, Delaunay, Jacques Villon, Henri Le Fauconnier, Albert Gleizes, and Francis Picabia formed an offshoot of the Cubist movement, the Puteaux Group, also called the Section d'Or (The Golden Section). During this period of Cubist inluence, Léger’s paintings became increasingly abstract.

While in the French Army during World War I, Léger produced sketches of artillery pieces, airplanes, and fellow soldiers. In 1919 he married Jeanne-Augustine Lohy, and in 1920 he met the architect Le Corbusier, who would remain a lifelong friend. During the 1920s, Léger, with his enthusiasm for modernity and urban culture continuing to grow, considered abandoning painting for ilmmaking. In 1922–24 he designed, produced, and directed for the cinema and theater. During this time, in collaboration with Amédée Ozenfant, Léger established a free school where he taught from 1924, with Alexandra Exter and Marie Laurencin. In 1924, inluenced by the work and theories of Theo van Doesburg and Le Corbusier, Léger produced the irst of his entirely abstract "mural paintings.” During World War II Léger lived in the United States, inding inspiration in industrial refuse found in the nation’s landscape—the juxtaposition of natural forms and mechanical elements. It was around this time that he painted his acclaimed Three Musicians (1944). After the war, Léger returned to France and joined the Communist party. His work became less abstract and he produced many monumental igure compositions.

In his inal years, Léger lectured, designed mosaics and stained-glass windows, and continued painting. Works he produced during this time include his series The Big Parade. In 1954 he began a project for a mosaic for the São Paulo Opera, which he would not live to inish. Fernand Léger died at his home in 1955.

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Exhibition Hours: Tuesday–Sunday: 10:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m.; Wednesday and Friday: 10:00 a.m.–8:45 p.m.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art is one of the largest museums in the United States, with a collection of more than 227,000 works of art. The Museum’s many galleries present painting, sculpture, works on paper, photography, decorative arts, textiles, and architectural settings from Asia, Europe, Latin America, and the United States. Its facilities include a landmark main building; the Ruth and Raymond G. Perelman Building; the Rodin Museum, and two historic houses in Fairmount Park, Mount Pleasant and Cedar Grove. The Museum offers a wide variety of activities for public audiences, including special exhibitions, programs for children and families, lectures, concerts, and ilms.

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