French artist, a member of the Cubist movement and one of the most important artists of the 1900s. First trained as an architect, he became a highly individualistic painter with work that featured bright, clear colors that were accented by strong black. Leger was mainly abstract in design. One of his most noted works was “Man in the City.”
The son of a Norman cattle dealer, Leger never drew as a young child. Around 16 or 17 he did some caricatures and sculptures and it suddenly occurred to him that he could never be a painter with “all that cattle running over me.”
To earn a living he became a photographic retoucher and did photomontage. He then became a draftsman in an architect’s office, but continued to paint on the side, never earning a cent from his work. During WW I, working as an engineer, he found that it brought him into contact with the reality and solidity of life. The war also brought him into greater contact with people, a truly deciding influence in his life. He got to know them, love them and their language; so full of imagery.
WWW II found him exiled to America; it his second visit. It was while he watched a man standing on Broadway that he had an profound insight, when “the lights kept changing and he seemed lit up, as if abstracted by the reflections of the neon lights. He would suddenly turn from red to green. There the idea of color outside of the drawn image came to me.” Modern psychology has found that for intensification of vision our eyes demand contrast and Leger, more than others, used this knowledge of contrast in his art to achieve a direct, deep physical reaction. “I believe in paintings that hook one!” he said. His greatest influences were Cezanne and Rousseau. It was only later in life that his own recognition came.
Leger married twice and purchased an abandoned inn at Gif-sur-Yvette, outside Paris, to satisfy his need for nature and rediscover his source of inspiration. It was there that he spent his last few months before he died on 8/17/1955.
Link to Wikipedia biography