Art: Leger

Among the fraternity, French art dealers have a handy way of figuring the value of pictures by artists with established reputation: they measure the canvases and divide the area into the resulting number of numéros (a numero being a space about five inches square). Pablo Picasso, highest priced of any French painter, gets about 7,000 francs per numero for his canvases. From that peak prices drop sharply. In Manhattan last week the Museum of Modern Art gave its first one-man show of the season to an artist rated by most dealers the third or fourth highest priced in France: Fernand Léger. His numéros are worth 1,000 francs apiece, and most of his canvases are large.

No painter ever sold himself more completely to the theory of a mechanistic art for a mechanical age than has Fernand Léger, but the important fact about his character to remember is that he is a Norman, a farmer’s son and a dirt farmer himself when he has the opportunity. The little farm near Lisieux which belonged to his father, he now owns and operates with the proceeds of his painting, distilling a fine applejack and stabling twelve cows in his barns. The machine age always fascinated him because it is so different from the life he knows best. As an art student in Paris he experimented briefly with Braque, Picasso and the other cubists but did not like their dependence on the fuzzy technique of the French impressionists.

Fernand Léger served three years as a stretcher bearer in the War, figured out in his own mind the sort of painting he wanted to do. Humanity appalled him. For more than 20 years he has been at work making confused, elaborate patterns of gears, wheels, lamps, streaks and segments of color, at about $2.50 a square inch. Tycoons and esthetes have paid that price, for all Leger abstractions have a technical slickness comforting to men of affairs, all make excellent decorations.

In Manhattan last week he tried through an interpreter to explain what he was driving at.

“A painter should not try to reproduce a beautiful thing, but should make the painting itself a beautiful thing. For example I have seen many beautiful women but I have never seen a beautiful painting of a beautiful woman. But you can take an ugly woman and make a beautiful painting of her. It is the paint itself that should be beautiful.”