BLACK FLOWER GIRL BASKETS

Oil on canvas; 116 x 81.4 cm.

Fernand Leger was born at Argentan, France. He began his career as a an artist by serving an apprenticeship in architecture in Caen and working as a architectural draughtsman. In 1900 Leger went to Paris and was admitted to the Ecole des Arts Decoratifs in 1903 and also attended the Academie Julian. The first profound influence on Leger's work came from Cezanne, whose pictures Leger encountered at the large-scale Cezanne exhibition at the 1907 Salon d'Automne.

Leger became friends with Delaunay and maintained ties with great artists, including Matisse, Rousseau, Apollinaire and leading exponents of Cubism. From 1909 Leger himself developed a quirky Cubist style, distinguished by reduction to the simplest basic forms and formal austerity linked with a pure, sharply contrasting palette by 1913-14. As a painter Fernand Leger exerted an enormous influence on the development of Cubism, Constructivism and the modern advertising poster as well as various forms of applied art.

From 1911 until 1912 Leger belonged to the Section d'Or group. During the first world war Leger came into contact with modern technology, notably cannon. The superhuman powers and precise beauty of ordnance enthralled him. By 1920, influenced by the persuasive assurance radiated by Purism and the form of retro Neo-Classicism practiced by Picasso and others, Leger had achieved a mechanistic classicism, a precise, geometrically and harshly definitive monumental rendering of modern objects such as cog-wheels and screws, with the human figure incorporated as an equally machine-like being. Surrealismus also left its mark on Fernand Leger in the 1930s, loosening up his style and making it more curvilinear. Leger taught at Yale University and at Mills College in California from 1940 until 1945. By now his dominant motifs were drawn from the workplace and were post-Cubist in form, combined with the representational clarity of Realism.

Spanish teenagers walking past or contemplating street art of a religious art flower carpet in La Orotava Canary Islands
on the day of the Corpus Christi 2009 celebrations event Tenerife