Man And Machine

Charles Darwent welcomes an exhibition dedicated to the French painter/film-maker, who took inspiration from mechanical modern life to develop his own take on Cubism

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SOME critics never learn. When Louis Vauxcelles, outraged at finding paintings by Matisse and his circle hung around a Donatello at the 1905 Autumn Salon in Paris, thundered that the Italian was ‘surrounded by wild beasts’, his young French targets clapped their hands. They would now be known, unforgettably, as les fauves (the wild beasts), their school as Fauvism.

Taking nothing from this bellyflop, Vauxcelles tried again. Writing of the cylindrical forms in a set of canvases at the 1911 Salon des Indépendants, the critic harrumphed that this was not Cubism at all, but mere ‘Tubism’. And thus, at a stroke, another star was born.

The man whose career Vauxcelles inadvertently launched was called Fernand Léger. The son of a Norman cattle farmer, Legér, aged 19, had renounced a career as an architect and left for Paris to study art. Paris was most certainly not Argentan.

Signing on at the famously avant-garde Académie Julian, Léger toyed, as most student painters of his day did, with Impressionism. Then, in 1904, he saw a Cézanne retrospective at the Autumn Salon and never looked back. Together with Picasso and Braque, he’s credited with inventing Cubism, although, as we have seen, he soon developed a tubular style of his own.