Master of Visual Slang

By ROBERT HUGHES

Fernand Leger (1881-1955) is the only one of the great early 20th century French Modernists who hasn't had a major museum show in America in nearly half a century. Picasso, Braque, Matisse, Duchamp and others, yes; but not Leger--a fact that is doubly odd, since no French painter, indeed, no French cultural figure of any kind, was more fascinated and stimulated by American culture, or did more to make a bridge between Paris and New York. Now, with an excellent and tightly focused show at Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art, this has happily changed. Curated by Carolyn Lanchner, the show is not exhaustingly large: it consists of only 56 paintings and 24 drawings. But it makes you realize that if you thought you already knew Leger backward and forward, you were probably wrong.

One is apt to think of him as a somewhat stolid, ruminative artist compared with a virtuoso like Picasso. It's true that there's no erotic content in his work, and little manifest lyricism or spontaneity. He painted with the steady determination, from form to closed form, of a silkworm chewing its way across a mulberry leaf. Much of his work is not Cubist at all, if Cubism means fragmentation. It was massively built and integrated, and it buried all traces of its construction process. But it could also be very surprising, and in its insistent reduction of the human form to mechanics, extremely weird--particularly when Leger's obsession with modernity coexisted with a sense of form and construction that went straight back to those archetypal figures of French classicism, Nicolas Poussin in the 17th century and Jacques-Louis David in the 18th. And what a draftsman Leger turns out to have been! Some of the drawings in this show are among the finest of the 20th century, and this too will come as a surprise.

One also thinks of Leger finding a typical style early and sticking to it. But this, as the show reveals, is not altogether true. He was a consistent artist but a very eclectic one as well, and one of the things that endears him to the Postmodernist temper is the way that traces of practically all the early 20th century movements, from Fauvism and Orphism to Cubism and even Surrealism, turn up in his work--not as a mishmash of quotes but as integrated elements. There's even a bow to Dada in a peculiar picture from 1930 in which the Mona Lisa shares billing with a can of sardines and a large bunch of keys.

In middle age Leger looked like a big Norman ox, square-headed, strong-nosed, an homme du peuple. And indeed his father was, by trade, a cattle breeder. But the son studied architecture, and this began a lifetime's fascination with structure. His art training was, in fact, classical. His main teacher was Jean-Leon Gerome, academic par excellence, and it's not much of a stretch to suppose that the Geromes and Bouguereaus he saw, with their pale, continuously rounded flesh (tubular, in a way) and their meticulous highlights, influenced the "Tubism" of his maturing style. The manikins in his Contrast of Form paintings, such as Exit the Ballets Russes, 1914, project a strange mixture of nervousness and solidity--sexless tin men bustling about in a narrow, overcrowded space.

But for Leger the crucial and formative experience of his youth was World War I. He enlisted in the French army and in the ghastly environment of the trenches found visual epiphanies in machinery--"the breech of a 75-mm gun in the sunlight, the magic of light on white metal." Compared with what those magic guns were doing to human bodies, Cubist "fragmentation" was a mere impertinence. He applied the forms of mechanized warfare to a deeply felt painting, The Card Game, 1917--French poilus in their characteristic melon helmets gambling at a table. With their clawlike hands they resemble predatory metal lobsters mutated by aggression. Yet it was among these fierce automatons that Leger, as he wrote, "discovered the French people...I found them poets, inventors of everyday poetic images--I am thinking of their colorful and adaptable use of slang. Once I had got my teeth into that sort of reality, I never let go of objects again."

He wanted to find an argot, a visual slang, that could encompass modern experience. Only the workers had it because they were hard up against the central fact of modern life: fabrication, teamwork, the design and use of machinery, and the mutuality--meaning class consciousness, expressed in strong trade unions--that came out of it all. The visual argot to describe this would have to come from the machine, "an offensive weapon to intimidate tradition." So from the end of the war through the '20s he set out to imagine the city as a machine--the metropolis clanking, shining, shifting and manufacturing reality. This produced some of his masterpieces, such as the enormous The City, 1919, or the yet more abstract The Typographer, 1918.

Leger was the only major Cubist, moreover, who had strong affiliations with American culture. Popular culture, that is: billboards, advertising, window displays, the glittering and chaotic face of Manhattan, endless in its growth and demolition, pumping imperative messages from its towers--the century's archetypal culture of vertigo and congestion. "The most colossal spectacle in the world," he wrote after going there for the first time in 1931. "Neither cinema nor photography, nor reporting, have been able to contain the astounding event that is New York seen at night from 40 floors up. It resists all vulgarization. It keeps its freshness."

He spent the Second World War in exile in America, fascinated by the color glow of neons ("I could never have invented it, I am not capable of such fantasies") and by the "romantic atmosphere in the good sense of the word" of "its vitality, its litter and its waste." It made him dream of colossal populist murals, which he never painted. But Leger's monumental paintings of construction workers on high steel are directly derived from New York.

Nevertheless, the tone of the big late work is distinctly French, not American. It becomes so by its mixture of socialist convictions with a high-art classical tradition. His paintings were, above all, about connectedness: figures harmonizing with one another, in locked and self-reinforcing compositions--metaphors of the banishment of social doubt, of fear and imbalance. "Free the masses of the people, give them the possibility of thinking, of seeing, of self-cultivation--that is all we ask."

Leger was as much of a Utopian as--and more of a socialist than--his friend the architect Le Corbusier. He believed in a world of working-class pleasure where, under the sign of central planning, people could issue from their tower blocks into green space on bicycles, and be a family. Such is the import of one of his big compositions, Leisure, Homage to David, 1948-49. Jacques-Louis David had painted some of the propaganda icons of the French Revolution, and Leger hoped to do the same for the next, socialist one. (He remained, in effect, the painter laureate of the French Communist Party, right up to his death in 1955.)

Leisure belongs to a very distant world of belief, one where Frenchmen could still believe in Stalin, but Leger had never wavered in his faith in the goodness of le peuple. He was, after all, the man who had found Monet's garden of rose bowers and water lilies at Giverny elitist and escapist, "too Impressionist." "A vegetable garden," he had harrumphed after his visit there in 1918, "is better constructed than a flower garden and is quite brightly colored."