This prestigious 1924 film by Marcel L'Herbier brought together other great designers of the 1920s, such as the architect Robert Mallet-Stevens, and the furniture and costume designers Pierre Chareau and Paul Poiret. The exhibition also evokes Léger's first contributions to the cinema: the poster projects and the animation of the credits for Abel Gance's film La Roue, or the poster and set design for the futuristic laboratory of L'Inhumaine. The genesis of the film, its influences, the different versions produced by the artist, as well as its critical reception and posterity in France and abroad, will be presented. This avant-garde film, which animates and alternates, in a rapid and jerky montage, everyday objects, characters and geometric figures, still ranks today among the undisputed masterpieces of experimental cinema. Cinema personalizes the fragment, it frames it and it is a new realism whose consequences can be incalculable." When he uttered this sentence, Fernand Léger had just made his first film, Ballet mécanique, in 1924, the result of a collective artistic effort with Man Ray, Dudley Murphy and the composer Georges Antheil. From 1919 onwards, Léger's works reflected the influence of the cinematographic image on his artistic approach: the illustrated books produced in collaboration with the poets Blaise Cendrars and Yvan Goll played with the vocabulary of the cinema by introducing close-ups, typographical research and kinetic effects.Īs early as 1925, Fernand Léger declared: " The cinema is thirty years old, it is young, modern, free and without tradition. It was during the First World War, while on leave in 1916 with his friend Guillaume Apollinaire, that Fernand Léger discovered Charlie Chaplin, a real revelation for the painter. This exhibition explores, in an exhaustive and completely new way, the strong, lasting and fruitful relationship that the painter Fernand Léger (1881-1955) had with the seventh art throughout his work.Īs a film lover, set designer, poster designer, theorist, director, producer and even actor, all the facets of Fernand Léger's involvement in the film world are evoked in this presentation.
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