Fernand Lger, Composition, Cahiers D'Art, Lithograph

Condition: Pre-Owned
Lithograph and stencil on vlin paper. Paper size: 11.024 x 8.94 inches. Excellent condition. Unsigned and unnumbered, as issued. Notes: From the album, Cahiers d'Art N24, 1949. Published and printed by ditions des Cahiers d'Art, Paris, under the direction of Christian Zervos, diteur, Paris, 1949. History of the publication: Cahiers d'Art is a French artistic and literary journal founded in 1926 by Christian Zervos. Cahiers d'Art is also an eponymous publishing house which has published many monographs on artists living in France in the first half of the twentieth century. Publications include the definitive catalogue of works by Pablo Picasso, Pablo Picasso par Christian Zervos, in 33 volumes, with over 16,000 images. The journal, founded by art critic Christian Zervos in Paris at 14, rue du Dragon in 1926, and was published until 1960. Though publication was interrupted from 1941 to 1943, the first post-war issue was dated 19401944 and focused on poets and writers from the Resistance, including Vercors. Cahiers d'Art also published selections from poet Paul luard's Open Book I (1940) and Open Book II (1942). After World War II, the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan was invited by Zervos to publish two articles on logic: Logical Time and the Assertion of Anticipated Certainty (1945) and The Number Thirteen and the Logical Form of Suspicion (1946). Samuel Beckett also contributed one of his earliest texts in French, The Painting of Van de Velde or the World and the Pants. The journal has been noted for the quality of its articles and illustrations which promoted Modern Art in France for over thirty years. Artists represented include Picasso, Matisse, Fernand Lger, Max Ernst, Raoul Dufy, Marc Chagall, Brncu?i, Van Gogh, Paul Klee, Henri Laurens, Moholy-Nagy, Jean Lurat, Joan Mir, Calder, Victor Brauner, De Chirico, Wolfgang Paalen, Marcel Duchamp, and Man Ray.

FERNAND LEGER (1881-1955) was a French painter, sculptor, and filmmaker. In his early works he created a personal form of cubism (known as "tubism") which he gradually modified into a more figurative, populist style. His boldly simplified treatment of modern subject matter has caused him to be regarded as a forerunner of pop art. Lger was born in Argentan, Orne, Lower Normandy, where his father raised cattle. Fernand Lger initially trained as an architect from 1897 to 1899, before moving in 1900 to Paris, where he supported himself as an architectural draftsman. After military service in Versailles, Yvelines, in 19021903, he enrolled at the School of Decorative Arts after his application to the cole des Beaux-Arts was rejected. He nevertheless attended the Beaux-Arts as a non-enrolled student, spending what he described as "three empty and useless years" studying with Grme and others, while also studying at the Acadmie Julian. He began to work seriously as a painter only at the age of 25. At this point his work showed the influence of impressionism, as seen in Le Jardin de ma mre (My Mother's Garden) of 1905, one of the few paintings from this period that he did not later destroy. A new emphasis on drawing and geometry appeared in Lger's work after he saw the Czanne retrospective at the Salon d'Automne in 1907. In 1909, he moved to Montparnasse and met Alexander Archipenko, Jacques Lipchitz, Marc Chagall, Joseph Csaky and Robert Delaunay. In 1910, he exhibited at the Salon d'Automne in the same room (salle VIII) as Jean Metzinger and Henri Le Fauconnier. In his major painting of this period, Nudes in the Forest, Lger displays a personal form of Cubism that his critics termed "Tubism" for its emphasis on cylindrical forms. In 1911, the hanging committee of the Salon des Indpendants placed together the painters identified as 'Cubists'. Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, Le Fauconnier, Delaunay and Lger were responsible for revealing Cubism to the general public for the first time as an organized group. The following year he again exhibited at the Salon d'Automne and Indpendants with the Cubists, and joined with several artists, including Le Fauconnier, Metzinger, Gleizes, Francis Picabia and the Duchamp brothers, Jacques Villon, Raymond Duchamp-Villon and Marcel Duchamp to form the Puteaux Groupalso called the Section d'Or (The Golden Section) paintings, from then until 1914, became increasingly abstract. Their tubular, conical, and cubed forms are laconically rendered in rough patches of primary colors plus green, black and white, as seen in the series of paintings with the title Contrasting Forms. Lger made no use of the collage technique pioneered by Braque and Picasso.
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