MARTIN S.JAMES

L ger at Rouses Point, 1944: A Memoir*

A FINE SURVEY of late work by Fernand Lager (1881- 1955) at the Whitechapel Art Gallery this winter' kindled memories of my encounter with the artist, then nearing his sixty-fourth birthday, at Rouses Point, N.Y., during the summer of 1945. This was the next-to-last year of Lager's wartime stay in the United States from November 1940 to December 1945, during which, he told an interviewer, 'I

painted better than I ever painted before'. In the course of those five years he produced the Divers series with floating colour planes, the American landscapes, the Three musicians (1944), and worked on the Cyclist and Circus series that he was to develop more fully after his return to France.

Recently graduated from college, I was in Rouses Point as an aide to the Swiss historian Sigfried Giedion, author of the now classic Space, Time and Architecture [1941]. Lager (Fig. 10) spent three summers near this small town on Lake Champlain, where the rolling farm country with its

apple trees reminded him of his native Normandy. This second summer he was joined by his old friend Giedion, then at work on Mechanization Takes Command [1948], a study of the impact of technology on everyday life, from the living-room and the kitchen to reaping, slaughtering and the assembly-line. Similarly Lager had been deeply involved with the technological revolution and the aesthetic of the machine. Giedion had ties with many major abstract artists and nearly every leader of the modern movement in architecture, particularly Le Corbusier. Lager's own association with Le Corbusier began early in the 1920s, when he came under the influence of Le Corbusier and Ozenfant's Purism.

Only two miles separated Giedion's house on Lake Champlain from the small, time-worn farmhouse that

Leger shared with his secretary, the vivacious Madame Roux. Both men were at home behind the stove: each

week there would be a dinner with easygoing conversation at one place or the other (Fig. 11).

When visiting the White Mountains of New Hampshire a couple of years earlier, Lager had marvelled at the

10. LUger on the porch of the farmhouse at Rouses Point, New York, 1944.

*Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations from Leger are from the author's notes made at the time, and all photographs save Fig.21, are from the author's

collection. We are most grateful to him for making them available to us [Ed.]. 'Reviewed in this Magazine, February 1988, pp.153-54.

11. Siegfried Giedion, Lager and Madame Roux outside the cottage, with cats. 12. Lager working.on a gouache medallion on the porch.

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LEGER AT ROUSES POINT

13. LUger with a rimless cartwheel.

14. Giedion's nineteenth-century mechanical food chopper.

15. Sagging shed with a wooden roller.

16. Overlapping wheels in shed.

17. Scythe-shaped prongs for lifting hay bales.

tangles of great fallen trees left to rot - an experience reflected in the heavy forms of The forest (1942), where barbed wire also makes its appearance. But what struck him most forcibly about rural America was the prodigality with which things were relegated to the junk pile. 'In

France, the paysan carefully picks up each nail, every stick.

They patch and re-patch a garment until hardly a shred remains of the original fabric . . . But in America the farmer is a boss who doesn't even have to set foot in the cowshed!'

Indeed, near the little house stood the outbuildings of a

not-long abandoned farm. Scattered around them was a

profusion of discarded artifacts - disc harrows, rollers, reapers, - and a multitude of unidentifiable wood and metal parts: an inexhaustible mine of 'mechanical frag- ment' (Figs.13 to 17). According to Giedion, what he termed Lager's 'waste paintings' reflected the rapid obsol- escence of goods, of cities and of people that is an American characteristic. Just a hundred years earlier Charles Dickens in his American Notes (1842) had observed this trend to

disposability. With his cloth cap, popular speech and bluff manner,

LUger wished to appear as a man of the working class. The image was consistent with his political views and

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with the idealisation of the proletariat that, from the 1930s, increasingly coloured his art. With particular relish he told of the Clichy prostitute who insisted he was or should be a pimp: no doubt about it, she exclaimed, he had the unmistakable air of a maquereau! Conversely he complained of his embellishment at the hands of the photographers: 'They pretty you up as if you were some chick.' Under- standable then (as reported by G.L.K. Morris) is his mock solemn comment on a Dufy: 'A l'ombre de Matisse enfleur!'.2 Only in his fifties could he bring himself to read Proust, Lager told me; Faulkner was more to his taste. What Old Masters did he admire? 'I have no time to admire', he shrugged. On his visit to Italy in 1924 he had patience only for Giotto and the primitives.

At least one critic has detected in Leger a streak of 'in-

spired primitivism' and has compared him to the Douanier Rousseau whom he knew well and admired.John Canaday, writing in the New York Times (24th November 1968), went so far as to claim that 'everything he wrote about art

S. was either naive or obtuse if it was not second hand'. Yet LUger, whose bluffness did not prevent him from

being highly articulate, was very consistent in his values, with an enormous appetite for every manifestation of 'modernity' and an insistence on expressing truth and

energy in the most direct way possible. Hence his famous 'law of contrasts' wherein he called for maximal oppositions of non-imitative colour together with maximal oppositions of freely chosen and juxtaposed forms.

Colour was LUger's central problem during the period roughly contemporary with cubism- from his Fauve- influenced landscapes of c.1906 to the tinted greys of the Nudes in the forest (1909-10; Rijksmuseum Kroller-Miuller) and eventually the Contrast offorms series of 1912-13, where whites and primary colours are used at full intensity. 'It was a most confused period.., from grisaille to colour.',

Torn between papa Matisse with his violent colours and papa Cezanne with his blue tonalities, we tried

everything. It was in 1908 or 1910 that Max Jacob and Guillaume

Apollinaire took me to Kahnweiler's to see paintings by Picasso, Juan Gris and Braque, who lived in Montmartre.

[LLger and his associates lived in Montparnasse.] 3 'Well, strange thing', I said to myself. 'These fellows

are trying to get away from colour just as I'm trying to work with colour!' 'Two Spaniards', that's how I ex-

plained it, 'the Spanish black-and-white'. But then Gris was a theorist, like all painters who go in

for sharp delineation, even Braque. Unlike the impulsive painters, they are forced to work by contrasts; they have no choice but to confront problems.

At this time I was friendly with Delaunay. Unlike Picasso, Braque and Gris, the two of us were interested in colour. But Delaunay worked with complementaries, putting reds next to greens; I was concerned with the contrast between colours.

Mondrian came later, around 1914 [Mondrian was in Paris from 1912 to 1914], always working in greys. Later he used pure hues like myself.

18. Room in the farmhouse with art nouveau desk and LUger's gouaches pinned on the wall.

Indeed, Mondrian named Leger as the cubist to whom he felt closest. And Lager in turn was influenced in his Purist

period by Mondrian's bold planes of pure colour. Around 1940 both artists were to work with colour free of the

confining line. For Lager and his friends the cubist years were difficult

ones economically:

Our life was incredibly Bohemian. To make ends meet I played music in the streets with a Russian nihilist, a fellow with a Chaliapin type of voice, who wanted to

sing 'for the people' only the 'people' couldn't under- stand him. So I sent him to the Champs Elysees, where he was a great success.

He lived with a Turkish girl. Since neither could understand the language of the other, they talked a sort of pidgin French. Nearby six Russians were living in a studio with a hundred and fifty stray cats, which they trapped to sell the fur. The stench was revolting! They made cat-stew with wine or vodka to cover the taste, and I got the street kids who watched us singing to pinch vegetables for it.

Of Nudes in the forest he recalled: 'I worked on that

painting an incredibly long time and on two occasions had to sell its stretchers. That Dutch lady [Mrs Kroller-

Miller] who bought it for 18,000 francs shed tears when I told her about it. We lost an incredible number of works, scraping down canvases and painting them anew.'

At Rouses Point, LUger had room to do only sketches and small studies, sitting in a low chair on rockers drawn

up to a narrow table on the cottage porch and working on

F. LEGER: Functions of Painting, ed. E.F. FRY, New York [1973], p.xii. The allusion, of course, is to Proust's A l'ombre desjeunesfilles enfleur. Cubist paintings with reduced colour were exhibited by Braque at Kahnweiler's

in November 1908. However, canvases by Juan Gris were not seen, even by his friends, until late in 1911.

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19. Seven gouaches with reaper parts, wheels, tractor seats and the Juggler.

20. Composition with pierced root, square post and flower.

a pad of about 12 by 18 inches (Fig.12). First he might do fairly descriptive pen and ink drawings of 'waste' elements in their setting, followed by more abstract treatments of the same motifs in gouache (Figs. 18-20). Often close variants of each other, they were tacked in thematic groups to the walls. A single sheet might contain four small, freely invented compositions. Typically, mechanical elements were placed in opposition to organic shapes- roots, flowers, tree trunks. Floating among these were more abstract, biomorphic, colour planes. Meandering linear forms - rope, barbed wire, stalks, vines- further complicated and at once unified the pictorial space.

Lager's interest in the mechanical object was originally stimulated by such things as the glinting, precisely tooled cannon breeches encountered during his war service in 1916-17. The mechanical object, he claimed, has a plastic quality that is 'objective': free of sentiment. This is even more true when, dissociated from its original context, it be- comes the 'mechanical fragment'. During a visit to LJger's New York studio, the art historian Meyer Schapiro pointed out that other artists too had aimed to paint 'nothing but the object'. 'Yes', Lager replied 'but I was the first to realise it dans le grand (on the large scale)'.

As L6ger extricated some exotically shaped shaft or lever from the farm scrapheap he would exult: 'Just look at this object, will you? Marvellous: like an African car- ving.' In fact for him mechanical objects can be said to have replaced the aesthetic or studio objects favoured by artists such as Matisse. Leger did, however, use the

accordion indigenous to the popular dance hall. 'One doesn't make drawings of art objects', Leger declared. 'I've never drawn mandolins, don't you see?'4

The mandolin is beautiful: let it be beautiful. You don't make paintings with things of beauty, but with crummy, anonymous ones- l'objet brut.

When I began to paint the mechanical fragment it was terrible, nobody could take it. Leonce Rosenberg kept my pictures two or three years without managing to sell a single one. Then they were taken down and Mondrians hung in their place. Mine were too strong, they were hidden in the corner.

Rosenberg, we know, was no more successful in selling Mondrians. Still, Leger went on, 'by 1925 Mondrian had his admirers, especially in Switzerland. Just imagine. . . a room completely bare but for a single Mondrian!' Such

purity went beyond Leger's understanding. 'The modern architect,' he wrote in 1933, 'has gone too far in his magnificent attempt to cleanse through emptiness. No more volume, no more form . . . slick brilliant surfaces where nothing can be hidden any longer . . . There is a worldwide catastrophe that results from some of the extreme excesses with which we are now struggling.'5

Man-made things, Lager held, tend to the geometric and rectilinear ('And they call me abstract', he once laughed, pointing to the bold red crosses of an American patchwork quilt.) Thus the geometric stands in opposition to the

organic - flowers, butterflies, birds, the human body. Many of his compositions were built around this contrast.

Lager often stated that the human figure should be

thought of as just another plastic element. No longer a 'subject', it functions as an 'object' among other objects. The colourless human figures found in his paysages animds c. 1920-23, he pointed out, 'are not white but grey':

It was discovered that grey is coloured by complemen- tarity - cast shadows taking on a colouration comple- mentary to the object itself. The best of the primitives understood this and often left the figure grey. The human figure should not be given a dominant value: for us it is no more significant than a flower.

His detachment with regard to the human body, Lager thought, may have had something to do with his experience of the Western Front. 'Just to endure the sight of the

corpses, we had to joke about them. Our German prisoners were appalled by such irreverence.'

At the same time Lager stressed that his experience at the Front led him to appreciate the solid virtues of the common man and made him want to bridge the gap between the artist and the people. While people do appear early in his work, only in the 1930s did the monumental

personnages that would dominate his last period come to the fore. They reflect not only his progressive socio-political

4 There is al least one exception to this rule: the ink drawing Natures morte d la mandoline, 1942, in the Galerie Louise Leiris; only part of the instrument is shown, however. (Galerie Louise Leiris, Fernand Liger, 75 gouaches, 1911-1955, no.56, p.46). 5'The Wall, the Architect, the Painter' in LEGER, op.cit. at note 1 above,

pp.94-95.

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21. Tree trunk onyellow ground, by Fernand Leger. 1945. 112 by 127 cm. (Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art).

outlook, but also a return to the tradition of grand figural composition from Poussin to David.

To Giedion, who appreciated classical architecture and urbanism rather more than painting, Lager enthused: 'I love those grandes machines, they are so mural, they fill space so satisfyingly (c'est si meublant).' By 1944, Lager had com- pleted the Divers series, wherein figures are strewn through the picture space with top and bottom, hands and feet virtually interchangeable. 'I tried to represent figures freely in space with other subjects- birds, football players . .. But sport remained too anecdotal, too earthbound [attachie au sol]. In Marseilles just before leaving France in 1940, I noticed bathers lying on the beach, as seen from above. But it was only when I saw people diving that I solved the space problem.'

With the Divers, Lager began a dissociation of line and colour or, if you will, of drawing and painting. The colour weaves in and out of the figures in autonomously shaped swatches - independent colour (couleur en dehors). The idea, he said, came from the flashing on and off of Broadway lights, arbitrarily transforming in hue the faces of passers- by.

Among the sketches I saw at Rouses Point were some of a subject Lager had broached a couple of years earlier, jauntily attired cyclists and their machines - partly inspired, he said, by the American taste for outdoor sports and eye- catching clothes. They would lead to such full-scale works as the Women cyclists, 1944 (St. Louis), the Splendid team, 1944-45 (coll. Richard Rubin, New York), and finally the

great Leisure activities inscribed Hommage a" Louis David

(Mus&e National d'Art Moderne, Paris). That summer too, Lager was continuing to develop the

spectrum of circus personalities that would fill the enormous canvases of his last decade, such as the Grande parade, 1954

(Guggenheim Museum, New York). The study of a man in profile with several hoops (Fig.19) is the prototype of the 1945 painting the Chinese juggler. I once witnessed

Lager tearing up the gouache of a horse, muttering in

good-humoured frustration 'I can't draw a horse . . . I have never drawn a horse!' Nevertheless Composition au cheval (fragment) appears on the shipping list I typed up for Lager before his return to Paris. Both juggler and horse appear in the Juggler and the dancer, 1954 (private collection, New York).

Like so many French artists Lager was enchanted by the circus - his Acrobats of 1918 (Kunstmuseum, Basel) has been read as an update of Seurat's famous Circus of 1891. He appreciated the inventiveness of its performers. 'The Fratellini, they made use of everything. All the animals worked. Goats on the table.., dogs . . . very fine those

dogs.' And he was thrilled by its constant and simultaneous movement: 'Le cirque, c'est mobile'.

The most mobile of arts is film, and to it Lager made a memorable contribution with Ballet Micanique, produced and directed by him in 1924, at a cost, he said, of seven thousand dollars. Of the thousand metres shot only three hundred were retained. Although 'I just wanted to create

rhythms - slow rhythms followed by faster ones', the film also introduced several anti-naturalistic devices: images kaleidoscopically multiplied through mirror devices, an invention he credited to his technical assistant, the young American Dudley Murphy; the Sisyphus-like repetition of the large woman endlessly climbing and re-climbing her stairs; the extreme close-up of the girl on the swing, her

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22. LUger in silhouette in his studio on Lexington Avenue, New York.

highly magnified lips closing and opening like a camera shutter. 'Yes, I think that in Ballet Micanique I was the first to make use of this kind of close-up. It [non-naturalism] is the eternal- but ever since the Italian Renaissance an art of correspondence, of imitation, has been demanded. The cinema today is simply filmed theatre.'

Lager would have loved to do 'a film exclusively with

light'.

The other day driving through the tunnel we saw reflec- tions sweeping over the automobile fenders like great flames. Or think of those curious effects when a car passes outside the room: the shutters cast shadows ascending or descending like music- up: la-la-la-la-la; and down: la-la-la-la-la.

Or in train stations, the rails with reflections gliding on them like serpents: the camera should stay in very close.

Or a man lighting his pipe, his face strangely illum- inated from underneath and from the sides. Or a bit of dimestore jewellery revolving under a spotlight so it

sparkles like a diamond. For the Ballet Micanique (although it wasn't in the film) I shot a close-up of a woman's

finger nail: it could have been a view into cosmic space.

He was also fascinated by the idea of a verism that would cut through our hypocrisies and cliches. 'Your American film always begins with a girl and a revolver. Without the revolver I think the American film could not exist.' The cinema would never capture true reality 'until we can film everyday family life through the keyhole'.

In the 1930s, Lager had gone to England as design consultant for the filming of H.G. Wells's The Shape of Things to Come. It was LUger who conceived the broad

cylinder-shoulders worn by all later space heroes. 'I wanted

to create a veritable world of the future, with transparent clothes and - to get away from Le Corbusier - spherical houses. But they wouldn't go along. Wells, the old fool, complained "you've brought in a madman who's costing us a fortune every day".'

Lager was enormously impressed by American gangster films. He had also metJohn Ford and John Steinbeck, but

despite The Grapes of Wrath he doubted that 'the cinema as we know it can be called art'.

It's rather an entertainment, like the popular novel.

Major talents haven't gone into film, only those who failed in literature. It's a shame what they do with film in this country. What's the sense of bringing over people like Rene Clair or Jean Renoir if you don't allow them to work in their own way? I saw Clair in New York the other day and he said 'Mon vieux, you can't imagine: you're absolutely hemmed in- you have to do this, have to do that.'

Hollywood has debased everything. They take French- men, Germans like von Stroheim and it's the same each time: find a star, a big name, shove her into a role, add sex appeal. As Clair says, its marvellous on the technical side: all sorts of projection methods. You need money, of course, in order to make films, but you also need how to say it? - real style, as with those French directors or those Russian movies we used to see.

The United States ('not a country but a continent', he told someone) astounded him by its magnitude, its contrasts, its paradoxes. Partial to American technology and comfort, he particularly liked the coast-to-coast buses that afforded

plenty of room for his legs. Still, he noted, 'a nation that can build an ultra-modern hospital just for horses, sometimes allows children to run ragged in the street'.

The scale of Lower Manhattan thrilled him at the same time as it jarred his sense of mesure (Fig.22). 'Amazing! So crowded by day, you can hardly move; at night, not even a cat; empty as the tombs of the Pharaohs. Office workers shut up in immense buildings never see the sun. What a

country! You get the feeling that man is trying to abolish nature. But the time must come when nature will strike back.'

He was intrigued to find in a small Arizona town 'living rooms decorated a la Louis-Quinze or Louis-Seize. Not a

plane surface in sight! It's just like France, when the petit- bourgeois bury themselves in furniture.' Surrealism he

regarded as 'an exasperated Rococo that's destined to become standard bourgeois taste in the future.' And of one successful Surrealist, perhaps Dali, he had this to say: 'Compared to that little fellow my work is incomparably newer, more plastic'. Preferable to bourgeois bad taste was the 'beautiful bad taste' of what has since been called

pop culture, 'ties painted with locomotives in glowing colours'. Lager's acceptance of garishness did not extend, of course, to faulty reproductions of his own work: 'The bastards! They make bad postcards from your paintings ... after you've worked so hard to get le ton juste!'

Lager himself combined the qualities of refinement and control on the one hand, with ruggedness and vigour on the other. How lovingly he once characterised an eight- eenth-century French painting: 'That's the French touch for you! On the mark . . . and in perfect taste. Delicate and just right!'

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