VAT. Guillem de Castro, 118
And the culmination arrived. The celebration of IVAM's thirty years gives way to fireworks by an internationally renowned avant-garde artist, capable of renewing a movement as powerful as cubism and of advocating futurism, Fernand Léger. Very politically committed and great defender of the social function of art, always maintained an optimistic attitude towards those machines that invaded our world, making it more ungraspable, and we are more insecure. In fact, The Frenchman developed the idea of the body as a machine using tubular shapes, abstract but very recognizable. This was after abandoning impressionism, impacted by the work of Paul Cézanne, and immersing himself in the language of the avant-garde.. These are years in which life becomes more urban and the city, with their cars and their neon signs, It is crossed by speed and rhythm, two characteristics that will be reflected in the art of the early 20th century. To understand the evolution of Léger's art we are going to look at four key works on the route proposed by the IVAM. The deliberately anti-narrative film Mechanical Ballet (1924) —created in collaboration with Man Ray—, that combines futurism, abstraction and surrealism within a mechanical game of almost twenty minutes; Still life with beer mug (1921), the exemplification of how Léger wanted to make modern art accessible by seeking the beauty of simple and everyday objects.; the great mural Essential joys, new pleasures, made for the Paris International Art and Technology Exhibition of 1937 —organized by his friend LeCorbusier, the same one in which the Guernica by Picasso, in the middle of the Spanish civil war—where he wanted to celebrate the pleasures of rural life and convey that hope can be created from the collective and human; y Study for “The Builders” (1950), showing bricklayers working together to create a new world. Nonetheless: circus, musicians, cyclists and more still lifes populate the work of an artist with strong communist convictions who believed in the transformative capacity of art and community. S.M.
