Peinture murale (Mural Painting)

Fernand Léger’s mounting interest in abstraction led him to execute, in 1924, different works under the generic name of mural painting. In these pieces, he would develop his particular vision of pure colours and orthogonal forms that found their ideal home on the large surfaces of modern architecture, surfaces that were more fitting than the confines of the canvas. In seeking to impart a sense of rhythm to a static space, Léger designed bands of vertical and horizontal colours that added dynamism to the pictorial plane and gave volume and depth. Therefore, the mural effectively destroyed the rigidness of the rectangle and the white wall.

This painting’s profound formal and technical relationship with the new theories of architecture of Le Corbusier and Robert Mallet-Stevens is evident — Léger presented the mural in 1925 at the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in the Pavillon de l'Esprit Nouveau, designed by Le Corbusier. A few years later, in 1930, he exhibited it again in the first exhibition of abstract painters, Cercle et Carré, founded by the painter Joaquín Torres García and critic Michel Seuphor as a reaction to the excesses of Surrealism.



Raúl Martínez Arranz