The Fernand Léger National Museum presents the exhibition Metropolis. Fernand Léger and the City. As the first part of this theme, A Habitable Painting offers a chronological re-reading of the projects for integrating painting into urban space by the Norman artist from the 1920s until his death in 1955.
Thanks to the rich collection donated to the State in 1969 by Nadia Léger and Georges Bauquier (drawings, oil paintings, sculptures, tapestries), the close relationships between the artist and the most innovative architects of their time such as Robert Mallet-Stevens, Le Corbusier, Paul Nelson, and Maurice Novarina are highlighted.
Thus, it is as a builder that Fernand Léger develops his pictorial aesthetics at the service of social revolution, made famous by monumental works intended for civil or sacred commissions such as the mosaic of the Litanies of the Virgin for the façade of the Notre-Dame-de-Toute-Grâce church on the Assy plateau in Haute-Savoie (1950) or the fresco The Transport of Forces commissioned by the French State for the International Exposition of Art and Technology in Modern Life in Paris in 1937.
Overall, the artist completed few urban projects, most occurring at the end of his life after his return from American exile in 1945.
Entitled The Spectacle of Modern Life (July 6 – October 7), the second part of the exhibition offers an original dialogue between the 29 plates of the lithographic album La Ville published by Tériade in 1959 from the artist’s gouaches (collection of the Fernand Léger National Museum) and photographs of urban landscapes from national collections, notably from the Media Library of Architecture and Heritage in Paris.
Diana Gay
Learn more: [https://www.musees-nationaux-alpesmaritimes.fr/fleger](https://www.musees-nationaux-alpesmaritimes.fr/fleger)
