Machine Age, Paris Style

In World War I, a young French stretcher-bearer got to thinking about life and art. People who wage war, he reasoned, are messy inside and out, but the precise, blankly implacable machines they kill with have a brutal beauty. Ever since then, Fernand Leger (rhymes with beige hay) has been painting flat, bright-colored pictures which look as smoothly efficient, and as difficult to comprehend, as the instrument panel of a B29.

Priced at about $2.50 per square inch of canvas (from $350 to $6,000), Leger's solidly meshed combinations of keys, wheels, metallic leaves and tubular women sell well to people who like to take their machine-age art neat. Mostly he confines himself to blacks, greys, and eye-stopping poster reds and yellows. Says he: "Nowadays a work of art must bear comparison with any manufactured object. The artistic picture is false and out of date."

Leger, who looks like a melancholy mechanic, recently returned to Paris after five war years in Manhattan. He works in a cold, dreary atelier on rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, warns visitors to "please keep your hat on, otherwise you will catch cold." One of Leger's happiest memories of the U.S. is the Ringling Bros, circus. Last year he painted two pictures of it which had all the power, but not the heavy complexity, of his usual stuff. They so impressed a Manhattan dealer that he decided to build a show of U.S. artists around them.

The show, entitled "The Big Top," opened last week. Dealer Samuel M. Kootz borrowed Picasso's pinwheel-shaped Acrobat from Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art for the occasion, invited six young U.S. abstractionists (Calder, Motherwell, et al.) to paint circus pictures to go with Leger's. The catalogue cover hopefully urged gallerygoers to see clowns, tumblers, bareback riders, and other intrepid performers. Some of their jigsaw abstractions looked as if they had played with kaleidoscopes instead of seeing a circus. Leger's Acrobats with White Horse and slant-eyed, four-ringed Chinese Juggler (see cut) were the hit of the show, as they were meant to be.

Leger appeared to have gained almost as much from Manhattan as U.S. moderns used to get out of Paris. Says he: "Nowhere else have I found such an energetic and dynamic atmosphere. The French public will be amazed when it compares my American painting with my pre-American output. America has added color to my palette."

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