Truth is often stranger than fiction, isn't it? Head to the newly opened venue of Charleston in Lewes for Dorothy Hepworth and Patricia Preece: An Untold Story , an exhibition that relates a piece of art history that, you have to say, would make a good film. And here are the two principal characters: Dorothy, on the left, a talented graduate of the Slade School of Fine Art , and her fellow student, friend, lover, partner and collaborator Patricia, perhaps not quite so talented, but both passionate about art. The photograph seems to tell you a lot. Dorothy looks a little bit awkward and ill at ease, slightly frumpy, androgynous even. Patricia appears confident, glamorous, exuberant, perhaps a little.... possessive? But maybe we're getting ahead of ourselves. We need to establish the plot.... The rather retiring Hepworth and the outgoing, gregarious Preece became inseparable as students, and they planned to set up a studio together after graduation. In 1922, Preece took exam
During and just after World War I, Fernand Léger seems to have been producing some very radical, cutting-edge art, and a number of the early works on display in the retrospective Fernand Léger: New Times, New Pleasures at Tate Liverpool convey a real sense of energy and modernity.
But as the years went on, that excitement seems to have faded from Léger's work. In this slightly bitty exhibition, we were left feeling that it would have been great to have had a little more of the early stuff and fewer pictures from his later, perhaps less enthralling period.
Léger, born in 1881, trained as an architect, and developed an artistic style heavily influenced by advertising and mechanisation. In The Disc from 1918, modern life is expressed in abstract forms and bright colours.
Léger had survived the war, but only just: He almost died in a mustard-gas attack in 1916, and a year later produced the painting that is perhaps the most striking in the entire exhibition: Soldiers Playing Cards. In an homage to Cézanne's pictures of card players from a quarter of a century earlier, Léger melds the influence of Cubism with the notion that in modern war men become one with machines; the soldiers appear made up of a series of tube-like machine parts. And all the hearts seem to be missing from the cards they're playing with.
After the Great War, some artists took a path of greater realism, as we saw in the Aftermath exhibition at Tate Britain a few months ago, but Léger wasn't really one of them. He did make landscape and still-life paintings, but keeping a strong sense of abstraction. Pictures like The Tugboat are made up of a mass of fragmented coloured geometric forms that take some time to decipher, reminiscent of the razzle-dazzle ship camouflage developed during the war. There's a proto-Pop Art feel to some of Léger's work, such as Still Life with Beer Mug, even though we're four decades too early.
Early on in this show, you can watch Mechanical Ballet, an experimental film made in the early 1920s by Léger that sees a rapid succession of flickering images that are almost surrealist, as with these upside-down dancing legs. With accompanying discordant music by the American avant-garde composer George Antheil, it's quite exhausting to watch. And more than a bit bizarre.
By this stage in his career, Léger had moved away from his focus on the mechanical object and become more interested in the natural world. His lines soften and his work gets a lot less intense.
Returning to France from America after World War II, Léger turned to often large-scale figurative paintings featuring workers and ordinary people enjoying days out, cycling for example, as in Leisure - Homage to Louis David. Another very French image. Léger believed that art was for everyone, and here's a construction crew at work. It's by no means socialist realism, it's far too light-hearted for that, and some of this team of workmen have more akin to acrobats -- another favourite Léger theme on show in Liverpool.
Practicalities
Fernand Léger: New Times, New Pleasures is on at Tate Liverpool until March 17. Opening hours are 1000 to 1700 every day. Full-price tickets cost £10.50, or £8 if you book online in advance, which you can do here. The gallery is at the Royal Albert Dock (with a fine view over the Mersey if you tire of the art), 15 to 20 minutes' walk from Lime Street station, where main-line trains arrive; James Street station is the nearest on the Merseyrail network and Liverpool One bus station is just a couple of hundred metres' walking distance from the Tate.Images
Fernand Léger, The Disc (Le Disque), 1918, Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2018.Fernand Léger, George Antheil and Dudley Murphy, Mechanical Ballet (Le Ballet mécanique), 1923-1924. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2018. Photo © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI.
Fernand Léger and Charlotte Perriand, Essential Joys, New Pleasures (Joies essentielles, plaisirs nouveaux). Pavilion of Agriculture, Paris, International Exhibition, 1937, reconstruction 2011, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2018.
Fernand Léger, Study for 'The Constructors': The Team at Rest (Étude pour ‘Les Constructeurs’: L'Équipe au repos), 1950, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2018. Photo: Antonia Reeve
Fernand Léger, Young Girl Holding a Flower (Jeune fille tenant une fleur), 1954, The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2018. © The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge
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