The November 1949 magazine cover of “Building the URSS” showing the construction of a building on Smolensk place in Moscow gives rise to the Constructuers series. An idea which Léger already had from the US skyscrapers and from seeing the great electrical towers installed by the Germans on the Lisores road.
The Constructeurs will be the contemporary work where the social depiction of labor is the most synthetically rendered, the strongest and the most monumental.
The Art Institute of Chicago will organize the last major retrospective during the artist’s life. Enough to further infuriate his virulent anti-American friends, led by Aragon who defended the social realism of soviet art, even describing his friend’s work as “non-revolutionary”!
Les Parties de Campagne presents an idealized view of the simple joys of paid leave, and La Grande Parade honors acrobats, clowns, riders, and the entire circus world which Léger loved since his youth; both of these works illustrate his humanistic and fraternal commitment to “workers”. But these creations which Léger wanted to be direct and accessible to all are also anchored in the traditional classics. This is clear in Les Loisirs executed in 1948-1949, as an explicit homage to Jacques-Louis David.
The American influence is the key to the final expression of his art. He paints larger and more freely. He invents new uses of color, inspired by the play of the advertisement lights in Times Square, illuminating everything, buildings and people. Color now is found where it always was: outside.
“I liberated color from form by laying on in large areas without the need to have it follow the shape of the object: in this way, it keeps all its power and the drawing does as well”.
He brings modernism to sacred art by executing for his friend Father Couturier (whom he met in the United States during his exile there) the great facade of the Plateau d’Assy church. The work, all done in mosaics, represents the Litany of the Virgin in a proliferation of colors. He also plays with color in the beautiful stained glass windows for the church of the Sacred Art of Audincourt and the church of Courfaivre. Another paradox for a so-called communist…
Indeed, it will be the works completed in the last ten years of his life that will have the most influence on American artists.
Léger’s influence will remain alive in the United States for many years following his death. Roy Lichtenstein literally quotes him: “ Trompe-oeil with Léger Head and Paintbrush” of 1973 or “Stepping Out” of 1978 incorporate elements directly taken from Léger’s paintings (the figurative and narrative works of Schlosser or Erro will do the same in 2000). Many others are influenced by him: Rosenquist and Jasper Johns (one of his late works of 1990 heaps together shapes and colors), Warhol, Keith Haring, Jim Dine…
Fernand Léger is the father of Pop-Art and the most American person from Normandie.
