03. ‘luminous one’ | Leger

…and Leger said, “What are you doing here?” and I said: “I’m moving in.” And it turned out the walls of my studio were also the walls of his. 

– Charlotte Perriand, 1999

Peter de Francia: ‘Mandarins and Luddites’, RCA, 1973

1977 Royal College of Art Abbey Minor Scholarship / Florence (Ghiberti / Brunelleschi)

1978 Royal College of Art Travel Bursary / Paris (Leger)

Fernand Léger: ‘Composition aux deux perroquets’, 1935-39, huile sur toile, 400 x 480 cm, S.D.B.DR. : F. LEGER 35-39 T.S.D. au revers : composition / aux deux perroquets / F. LEGER 1935-39. Acquisition don de l’artiste, 1953, Centre Pompidou, Paris

“Considérée par Léger comme l’une de ses œuvres les plus abouties, la Composition aux deux perroquets fut exposée à Paris, une seule journée, le 15 avril 1940, dans l’atelier de son amie Mary Callery, avant d’être envoyée à New York, et d’y demeurer tout le temps de la guerre. / Elle est exposée au Museum of Modern Art, du 27 décembre 1940 au 12 janvier 1941, puis à Oakland, l’été suivant. Léger la fait revenir à Paris à l’occasion de l’exposition rétrospective qui lui est consacrée au Mnam par Jean Cassou, à l’automne 1949. Il l’offrira au Musée en 1953.”
1980 Collage

1987 Drawings

“Writing to Gide in December 1902, Paul Valéry, that most perceptive of critics, stated: ‘To tell the truth I think that what one calls art is destined either to disappear or to become unrecognisable.’ In context his statement was extraordinary prophetic of what was to ensue and of what has taken place.” 

– Peter de Francia: The State of British Art: A Debate, Day #2, ICA, London, 1978  

1989 ‘Cader Idris and the City of a Thousand Trades’, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham

Fernand Léger: ‘The Great Parade’ (definitive state) (La grande parade [état définitif]), 9 feet 9 3/4 inches x 13 feet 1 1/2 inches (299.1 x 400.1 cm), 1954, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
Paris, 10 January 2020

This road is dominated by that desire for perfection and total liberation which produces saints, madmen and heroes. … The rarefied nature of its artistic formula makes it extremely vulnerable. It is a light, luminous and delicate structure, coldly emerging from the surrounding chaos.

– Fernand Leger: ‘De l’art abstrait’, 1931

[17.11.2025]

Polychrome, functional synergy and art integration in the France-USA Memorial Hospital of Saint-Lô, Normandy (1948-1965), Paul Nelson, architect.

Wartime New York—with its dynamic commercial, architectural, and technological infrastructure—offered renewed possibilities for the realization of Léger’s projected chromatic vision. In 1942, for example, he was invited by the architect Paul Nelson to speak to a committee of the US Housing Authority in Washington, DC, which was charged with providing housing for war workers, about his ideas for using color in town planning. Léger outlined a theory that involved combining colors to produce different effects in various areas of the town: in the center, brilliant colors would be combined in a “cocktail” in order to reflect the excitement and variation of its activity. Outside the city center, color was to become less intoxicating, with one strong color balancing more neutral tones in residential areas to produce a more intimate atmosphere that would have a positive emotional effect on the inhabitants. While Léger met with sympathetic supporters in the United States, including Nelson, his leftist political views and modernist aesthetic were never to garner backing from officials. When read against the backdrop of World War II, Léger’s idealistic belief in human emancipation through the careful organization of color and light appears as a gesture of hope for the future, for a radical rebuilding and restructuring of Europe (and France specifically) based on collective ideals, and for overcoming the chasm opened up between rationalist thought and feeling.

– Meredith Malone, Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in St. Louis, 2011