Fernand Léger, ‘New Times, New Pleasures’ at Tate Liverpool

Fernand Leger, ‘Woman and Still Life’ (1921), oil on canvas, 65.5 x 92cm

Tate Liverpool’s major show of Fernand Léger- his first in Britain for 30 years- hosts the great Cubist innovator’s murals alongside 30-plus canvasses, not to mention publications, photographs, and experimental films. It’s clear from looking at the show that post-WWI, Léger hitched his own brand of Modernism to the chariot of international socialism; with very mixed results. Strange how History’s door can seem ready to slam on any past dedicated to an impossible future…

The monumental figure paintings have come to resemble archetypes from an artist’s utopian dream; a cultural basis for a societal transformation that has remained precisely that: a dream. The faceless inflatables, happy workers and stoic family units have since become the stuff of household cliché; regurgitated Athena (remember them?) poster Modernism for jaded Postmoderns.

Ironically, despite the optimism and emancipatory potential heralded by the culture of modernity, it is the strangeness of some of the more intimately-sized still-lives of the late 1920s and early 1930s that resonates more deeply in Liverpool. Here, intricate patterning and sudden breaks in perspectival space, combined with radical abstractions of organic forms, point us towards a sense of alienation from the real; a subtle re-orientation of visual perception, through the use of hard edges, constant repetitions, and the metallic sheen of a Cubism honed by the machine aesthetic.

Léger’s notion of ‘Pictorial Realism’ was based on this simple formula: ‘The simultaneous ordering of the three great plastic components: lines, forms and colours’. The work that followed this mantra still manages to excite the eye; leaving Instantloveland, for one, feeling that, for all that they resemble relics of a lost world of aspiration for Modernism and Socialism, these paintings, films and murals, by their very nature, keep History’s door wedged open.

Exhibition runs until March 17th 2019.