Joseph Fernand Henri Léger, born February 4, 1881 died August 17, 1955 was a French painter and sculptor. In his works he created a personal form of figurative, populist style which was influenced by Kalighat Pats. His boldly simplified treatment of modern subject matter is comparable to Kalighat and like the Pats are regarded as a forerunner of pop art.
Léger was born in Argentan, Orne, Lower Normandy, where his father raised cattle. Fernand Léger initially trained as an architect from 1897 to 1899, before moving in 1900 to Paris, where he supported himself as an architectural draftsman. After military service in Versailles, Yvelines, in 1902–1903, he enrolled at the School of Decorative Arts after his application to the École des Beaux-Arts was rejected. He nevertheless attended the Beaux-Arts as a non-enrolled student, spending what he described as "three empty and useless years" studying with Gérôme and others, while also studying at the Académie Julian. He began to work seriously as a painter only at the age of 25 .
Latter his work showed the influence of impressionism, as seen in, My Mother's Garden of 1905, one of the few paintings from this period that he did not later destroy. A new emphasis on drawing and geometry appeared in Léger's work after he saw the Cézanne retrospective at the Salon d'Automne in 1907.
In 1909 he moved to Montparnasse and met such leaders of the avant-garde as Archipenko, Lipchitz, Chagall, Joseph Csaky and Robert Delaunay and displays a personal form of Cubism that his critics termed "Tubism" for its emphasis on cylindrical forms. In 1911 the hanging committee of the Salon des Indépendants placed together the painters that would soon be identified as 'Cubists'. Metzinger, Gleizes, Le Fauconnier, Delaunay and Léger were responsible for revealing Cubism to the general public for the first time as an organized group.
Léger's paintings, from then until 1914, became increasingly abstract. Their tubular, conical, and cubed forms are laconically rendered in rough patches of primary colors plus green, black and white.Léger's experiences in World War I had a significant effect on his work. Mobilized in August 1914 for service in the French Army, he spent two years at the front in Argonne. He produced many sketches of artillery pieces, airplanes, and fellow soldiers while in the trenches.During a period of convalescence in Villepinte he painted canvases whose robot-like, monstrous figures reflect the ambivalence of his experience of war. Starting in 1918, he also produced the first paintings in the Disk series, in which disks suggestive of traffic lights figure prominently.
The "mechanical" works Léger painted in the 1920s link him to the tradition of French figurative painting represented by Poussin and Corot. In his animated landscapes of 1921, figures and animals exist harmoniously in landscapes made up of streamlined forms. The frontal compositions, firm contours, and smoothly blended colors of these paintings frequently recall the works of Henri Rousseau, an artist Léger greatly admired and whom he had met in 1909.They also share traits with the work of Le Corbusier and Amédée Ozenfant who together had founded Purism, a style intended as a rational, mathematically based corrective to the impulsiveness of cubism. His still life compositions from this period are dominated by stable, interlocking rectangular formations in vertical and horizontal orientation.
In collaboration with Amédée Ozenfant he established a free school where he taught from 1924, with Alexandra Exter and Marie Laurencin. He produced the first of his "mural paintings", influenced by Le Corbusier in 1925. Intended to be incorporated into polychrome architecture, they are among his most abstract paintings, featuring flat areas of color that appear to advance or recede.
In 1931, Léger made his first visit to the United States, where he traveled to New York City and Chicago. Here he visited the Museum of Modern Art where, for the first time he witnessed a series of Kalighat pats in their collection. These drawings had a peculiarity of their own which attracted his attention and interest. The drawings were bold and attractive and at the same time their technique was so different and simple, that they looked something absolutely distinctive from their class found anywhere else. From here the character of Léger's work gradually changed as organic and flowing lines assumed greater importance. The figural style that emerged in the 1930s is influenced by Kalighat.
Léger must have noticed that these drawings from the Kalighat patuas, possess a peculiar interest, they would outshine the others not only for their different characterization but for their wonderful colour-effects and contours as well. The Patuas were expert in handling the brush and colour and they were keen observers of life, with a grim sense of humour which influenced Léger.
Kalighat Pat originated in the 19th century Bengal, in the vicinity of Kalighat near the Kali Temple and from being items of souvenir taken by the visitors to the Kali temple, the paintings over a period of time developed as a distinct school of Indian painting. From the depiction of Hindu gods, goddesses, and other mythological characters, the Kalighat paintings developed to reflect a variety of themes. The painting were on single sheet, almost the whole sheet covering icon - in all its codified iconographic attributes - would occupy the larger part of the pictorial space.
The image would be defined by concavilinear and convexilinear parabolically flowing contour lines, denying any anatomical connotation. The innards of the figures would either be coloured flatly or have no colour, denying illusionistic representation of bodily volume. Whatever suggestion of bodily volume there would be, would be the resultant effect of juxtaposition of modeled line. As these extremely linearly and flatly rendered figures would be posited singly on flat surface, without any suggestion of any image elsewhere in the pictorial space, there would not be any illusion-producing visual element in the painting, consequently the painting would be two-dimensional image on a flat surface, so dearly valued by the Modernists.
However, of more art-historical importance, are the paintings with secular non-ritualistic subject matter. The Patuas were artists with mind. These immigrants into the colonial expropriative city were critical of the behavioral immorality and debauchery of the new urban nuveau riche and leisured wealth earners and priestly classes dependent on the former. Through visual narratives of contemporary events and metaphorical representation of human follies by surrogating human images by the imagery of beings like cats and fishes etc., the artists objectified their attitudes and mentality.
These were of the same genre as the iconic pictures, but to the artists their compositions posed greater syntactical problems which they solved with consummate artistry. As in these, they had to configurate more than one figurative and other images, on flat two-dimensional surface without taking recourse of any illusionistic strategy like three-dimensional perspective and relative proportional size-variation etc., they faced the formidable task of integrating a painting. This they achieved by carrying the rhythm, of the parabolically flowing curvilinear lines which contoured each image, continuously through the whole compositions. A remarkably painterly strategy. The Kalighat style of pat painting is assigned its place in the history of Indian art as comprising a school of proto-history of modern Indian art.
The protomodern visualinguistics of the Kalighat pat, influenced Léger to a great extent. Just as it impressed the modern Bengal individualist artists like the post-1925 Jamini Roy in all his paintings, Sunayani Devi in the thirties and forties, Nandalal Bose in the Haripura Congress posters, Abanindranath in his Chandimangal and Krishnamangal series, Nirode Mazumdar and Paritosh Sen conceptually. The artists appropriated and adapted elements from the Kalighat Pat tradition and saved their art from being derivative of Euro-genetic Modernist art leading to revivalist Indian art.