Fernand Leger (1881-1955) Large Jacomet Lithograph

Fernand Léger (1881-1955) Important Jacomet process stencil lithograph in color on Auvergne vellum paper signed and dated 52 in the lower right plate. Good general condition, quality black lacquered frame. Dimensions: 1 m 02 high X 73 wide / at sight: 72 cm X 58 cm. Fernand Léger (1881-1955) is a French painter, also creator of tapestries and stained glass cartoons, decorator, ceramist, sculptor, draftsman, illustrator. From 1903, Léger shared a studio with the painter André Mare. The famous Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler will become his merchant. In 1907 he was very marked by the retrospective devoted to Cézanne which definitively oriented his painting. The same year, he discovered the cubism of Picasso and Braque. From 1908, he worked alongside Modigliani, Laurens, and especially Alexander Archipenko, and became friends with Blaise Cendrars, Max Jacob and Guillaume Apollinaire and dialogued, among others, with the painter Robert Delaunay. In 1909 he painted La Couseuse, which opened his Cubist period. From Nu dans la forêt (1909-1910), Léger offered a personal cubism. Under certain aspects this work is an anticipation of Italian Futurism. If he shared the cubist concern to create a non-figurative realism, he distinguished himself from the Montmartrois by imposing a cubism that was not intellectual but visual. His concern is not, in fact, to represent the totality of the object, but to distinguish each object in volume and in plan within an ideal space. An assiduous spectator of the Medrano circus, Fernand Léger paints acrobats, clowns, jugglers whose “mechanized” bodies have the same value as objects and sets. In 1924, with the help of Dudley Murphy, he shot the film Mechanical Ballet where the use of close-ups and the use of multiple fragmentation effects produced a repetitive dynamic. The same year, Fernand Léger became closer to the purists and participated in the magazine L'Esprit nouveau. He practices, according to Louis Vauxcelles, “tubism”. His interest in dynamism, "a reflection of the modern world", led him to move away from the intimate and traditional themes of Braque and Picasso, and painted contemporary subjects. He joined the French Communist Party in 1945, of which he remained a member until the end of his life. Léger directed several schools of painting, first in Montrouge then boulevard de Clichy, in Montmartre. In Biot (Alpes-Maritimes), the Fernand Léger National Museum, built by his wife, Nadia Léger, and Georges Bauquier, is dedicated to him and exhibits the largest collection of his works.