Fifty years after the museum first opened and two years after extensive renovations, the musée national Fernand Léger presents Discs and Semaphores. Signal language in the work of Leger and his contemporaries.
Based on a new idea developed by Arnauld Pierre (university of Paris-Sorbonne), it compares the pictorial signs used by Léger around 1920 and the language of signalling and modern signage. Léger was keenly aware of the changes taking place in his time and intrigued by the development of means of communication linked to the rapid growth of railways, maritime and river transport and the transformation of the urban environment in general. Signals, lettering and pictograms are used in his works as plastic motifs, sometimes schematised to the point of abstraction. The concise forms and flat tints of modern communication techniques give his pictures their punch.
The exhibition explores the influence and assimilation of maritime, railway and urban signs through numerous works painted around 1920, such as Composition (Le Disque), 1918 (Musée Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid), Le Grand Remorqueur, 1923 (Musée Fernand Léger, Biot) and La Ville, 1919 (The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Florene May Schoenborn Bequest, 1996). The visual material that triggered them is evoked in photo essays by Léon Gimpel and members of the Nouvelle Vision movement between the two wars: François Kollar, Man Ray, Brassaï... In Léger’s hands, rather than being mere emblems of the modern world, signals dominate the composition, structuring the entire pictorial surface.
The exhibition also considers the urban environment as a concentrate of abstract visual communication. In the inter-war period, large cities resembled an immense jigsaw of schematic images: store signs, posters, signage, name plates and billboards. The fragmentation and decomposition of movement in Léger’s works on this theme reflect an experience of city life. Pictograms of various kinds: figurative (human silhouettes), schematic (arrows) or symbolic (fragments of railing or metal girders) seem to be units in an elementary, universal visual language. Writing is part of the schematisation plan.
Stylised letters and fragments of words herald experiments by Josef Albers at the Bauhaus or Wladyslaw Strzeminski, in Poland, on reducing letters to the lowest threshold of recognition. Pictographic reduction is another aspect of Léger’s heraldic painting, illustrated by works which come close to the aesthetic of a store sign: such as Hommage à la danse in 1925 (private collection). It influenced progressive graphic artists in Cologne, Franz-Wilhelm Seiwert or Gert Arntz, one of the inventors of isotype and modern pictography.
The exhibition ends with a section on the “Exposition internationale des Arts et Techniques”, held in Paris in 1937. The signal aesthetic reached its apogee in the decoration of the Palais des Chemins de fer, a collective work by Robert and Sonia Delaunay, Félix Aublet and Pierre Hodé. Although his influence was obvious on some of the great decors at the 1937 fair, Fernand Léger submitted to the organising committee several projects to decorate the Eiffel tower, which, had they been accepted, would have been one of the high points of the signal aesthetic. The 1937 exhibition had a major impact on young artists, including Nicolas Schöffer, who, ten years later, went on to develop cybernetic art, exploring the science of signals.
