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Joseph Fernand Henri Léger (1881-1955) was a French painter, filmmaker, and sculptor. He is considered one of the forefathers of Pop Art because of his bold renderings of his subjects and his modified figurative style. His paintings often featured subject matter related to the increasing commercialization of society, and he was one of the first artists in the 20th century to explore these themes. He also developed a mechanical style of painting that was focused on geometric forms which became his defining style throughout his career.

From 1897-1899, Léger trained as an architect and moved to Paris in 1900 to work as an architectural draftsman. He served in the military from 1902-1903 before enrolling at the School of Decorative Arts. His career as a serious painter did not start until he was 25 years old, at which point he was influenced by Impressionism and focused on drawing and geometry.

In 1909, Léger moved to Montparnasse. A year later he exhibited a unique version of a Cubist painting called Tubism in the Salon d’Automne. Tubism emphasized the cylindrical form rather than that of the cube. Between 1912 and 1914, he formed an artist group with various contemporaries, such as the Duchamp brothers, called the Puteaux Group (alternatively called the Section d’Or, the “Golden Section”). He also began creating art that was increasingly abstract. He used patches of bright primary colours alongside black, white, and green in a collage-like compositional technique pioneered by artists like Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso.

In 1914, Léger sketched images of artillery, equipment, and soldiers while he was stationed at Argonne as part of his service in the French Army during World War I. In 1916, he was caught in a mustard attack by the Germans at Verdun and almost lost his life. During his recovery, he began to develop a style that would define his “mechanical period”. This style used tubular forms and geometric shapes to render his subject matter. The mechanical nature of his aesthetic and form allowed Léger to be considered in relation to the postwar French figurative artists, such as Poussin and Corot, who called for a kind of ‘return to order’ through their art.

In the 1920s, Léger continued working with his mechanical forms. He began to draw influence from artists such as Henri Rousseau, Le Corbusier, and Amédée Ozenfant. The latter two artists had established an artistic style called Purism, which drew on mathematical rationale and combined it with the impulsive nature of cubism. This helped Léger blend the traditional and the modern in a balanced composition. In the 1920s, Léger also considered giving up painting to pursue a career as a filmmaker. He collaborated with Man Ray, Dudley Murphy, and George Amtheil in 1924 to produce the film Ballet Mécanique (“Mechanical Ballet”), which blended human action with mechanical movement.

 During the Second World War, Léger lived in the United States and taught at Yale University. At this time, he drew inspiration from the surrounding industrial landscapes, taking particular interest in industrial waste intermingled with organic forms (such as flowers, birds, people, etc.). He also drew inspiration from the neon lights of New York City in the development of paintings that juxtaposed bands of colour with figures that were starkly outlined in black. When Léger returned to France in 1945, his work became less abstract and focused on the depiction of everyday life among various groups of people, including labourers, acrobats, and divers. This new focus on rendering common people was informed by his involvement with the Communist Party beginning in 1945. In the latter half of the 1940s, he ventured into new artistic media, exploring mosaics, stained glass, and polychrome ceramic sculptures, among others.

He spent the final five years of his life creating commissions for the Central University of Venezuela and working as a teacher in Bern, Switzerland. Throughout his career and in the decades that followed, Léger’s work was collected and commissioned by many notable institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the General Assembly Hall of the United Nations Headquarters in New York. There have also been numerous exhibitions of his artwork, including a retrospective that was held in 2014 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.