ART CHRONICLE
,
MASTER LEGER
Leger was overlooked for a while. The conscious preoccupa–
tions of the younger painters in New York during tQe '40s lay in a dif–
ferent quarter; and so few of his 1910-13 pictures were known. He was
over here during most of the war, and what he showed us then was
not impressive. Nor-but let this be said to his credit-did he try to
impress us with his personality. Now we have begun to know better.
His large retrospective at the Museum of Modem Art (where it came
from the Chicago Art Institute, which organized it) makes it quite
clear that, besides being a major fountainhead of contemporary style,
Leger belongs with Matisse, Picasso, and Mondrian among the very
greatest painters of the century.
The sequence of promise, fulfillment, and decline his exhibition
revealed was much like that in the previous Matisse, Picasso, and
Braque retrospeetives, and its dates site the chronological contour lines
of School of Paris painting over the last forty or fifty years. For Matisse
fulfillment came between 1910 and 1920; for Braque, between 1910
and 1914; for both Picasso and Leger between 1910 and 1925. None
of the four was ever, before or after thcse dates, as consistent in quality,
and very seldom as high.
Michel Seuphor refers to 1912 as "perhaps the most beautiful date
in the whole history of painting in France." That year Cubism reached
fullest flower, and Leger was one of the three artists mainly responsible,
even though he did not paint with "cubes." 1913 was another beautiful
year, perhaps more so for him if not for Picasso and Braque. In 1914
he had, like Braque, to go to war, and the few paintings he finished
while in the army are rather weak. But he recovered his level as soon
as he had the chance to work regularly again, and the pictures he did
from 1917 until at least 1922 are just as original and perhaps even
more seminal. Yet they do not quite come up to the pure, the utter
