Fernand Léger, A. C. Danto Art Column

[[Category: Graphic & Plastic Arts]

Danto, Arthur C. "Fernand Léger." Under Art, The Nation 255.14 (20 April 1998): 33-35. ACD asserts that Léger presented a "call to order" in his works after World War I, but not an order that was nostalgic and patriotic—nor one showing a France that was traditionally charming. "He created, rather, a world charming in its spotless modernity. It was a landscape of mechanical order, in which objects looked like Art Deco representations of themselves. It was a world in which, for example, the ocean liner Normandie [sic: no italics] would entirely resemble its airbrushed posters. Léger's world is one in which everything is sleek and polished the way machines have to be to work, as frictionlessly as possible." So in the 1920s Léger "created a France, at once machine-age and eternal, in which boneless men and women went imperturbably about the basic tasks of life, as in a kind of ballet," arguably a BALLET MÉCHANIQUE, which ACD alludes to earlier on the page (see Drama for Léger's BALLET). ACD sees Léger's cityscapes belonging to "the same genre of imaginary places as Toontown in WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT? The pictures make you feel good just to look at them. Collectively, they compose the landscape of life as good to live," for what we see as a very optimistic view of the mechanical world (35).