Draw first!
Fernand Léger and the portrait
12 october 2019 - 2 March 2020
By presenting drawings from his rarely exhibited collection, the Fernand Léger National Museum highlights the diversity of Fernand Léger’s drawings. For the artist, drawing is not only preparatory and demanding work for painting; it is also a mode of expression in itself that Léger practised every day, taking pleasure in transcribing with fineness and spontaneity his observations of beings and things.
Although the theme of portraiture is only marginal in Fernand Léger‘s paintings, it seems omnipresent in his drawing: sketching spontaneous scenes of everyday life, depicting a beloved woman to fill her absence and adjusting the composition of an academic portrait or fragmenting the body to better grasp its essential lines... Fernand Léger's drawings, abundant and intimate, are revealed in this exhibition around the painter's ever-renewed interest in the human figure.
Curators : Julie Guttierez, Curator at the Fernand Léger National Museum, and Nelly Maillard, manager of permanent collections at the Fernand Léger National Museum.
Légende : Fernand Léger, Portrait d’Henri Martin (détail), vers 1952, musée national Fernand Léger, donation Nadia Léger et Georges Bauquier (1969). Photo Gérard Blot ©ADAGP, Paris, 2019.
