Fernand Léger, "Contrast of Forms"
About this video
Curator Anna Temkin explains how Fernand Léger found his own style in 1913 with the Contrast of Forms series. By hiding the figures behind mechanical shapes, combining primary and secondary colors with black and white, and leaving rough raw canvas, Léger wanted viewers to enjoy the painting like music, as a painting rather than a story.
You'll be able to
- explain what Léger wanted viewers to experience in Contrast of Forms.
- describe how his materials and handling make us notice the painting as a painting.
- explain why 1913 viewers might have seen it as unfinished.
Key words
- Primary and secondary colors
- Primary colors are red, yellow and blue; secondary colors such as green are mixed from two primaries.
- Narrative
- A story that a picture tells.
- Raw canvas
- Canvas left unpainted so its fabric texture shows.
- Contrast
- Placing very different colors or shapes next to each other so each stands out.
Transcript
(music) - [Anna Temkin] 1913 was a banner year for Leger. It was the year in which he figured out how to become a Leger instead of a follower of Picasso or Braque. He did a large series of paintings entitled Contrast of Form. Each of these examined the ways in which these basic primary and secondary colors could be put together with black and white in order to make a canvas like, that music, could be appreciated without having to read it as a certain kind of scene or a narrative.
Contrast of Forms, what does that tell you, not a whole lot, so what he's not telling you, very deliberately, is that this painting would have been figures and you see these kind of mechanical shapes, almost like mannequins or tin men, that form these vertical stacks, very much like bodies.
Like any painter at that time, Leger would have training from life to do anatomy. Now he's trying to put that behind him trying to turn what might be a rather calm image into one that almost seems like a snapshot caught at an accidental moment in mid motion. He wants you to look at this painting as a painting.
He leaves so much of that burlappy canvas blank and raw, those pigments on it, they feel kind of crusty and almost like they're put there not by a painter with a fine brush, but somebody applying things in a much more rugged way, in a much more hands on way. The white is applied almost like chalk.
It's so rough. To make this picture pop, an offsetting, contrast, as Leger knew, to these reds and blues, yellows and greens, that would have been unthinkable in painting a mere ten years before this. I bet you when this painting was put on view in 1913, most of the viewers would have thought, "When is the painter gonna come along "and turn this sketch into something "that's actually a final product?"
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