Rich essays on art, politics, and artists as Marxist critics Balcomb Greene and Clarence Weinstock (Charles Humbolt) offer differing assessments of the work of French painter Fernand Leger.

‘Differences Over Fernand Leger’ by Balcomb Greene and Clarence Weinstock from Art Front. Vol. 2 No. 2. January, 1936.

The Function of Leger by Balcomb Green

THE work of Fernand Leger, approached only by description and analysis, cannot be experienced. Analysis may supply courage. Basic to courage is our knowledge that all man does and feels is implied in the biological structure of himself and his universe. All comprehension, expression, and action are part of an equation in the other half of which science tolerates no mysteries. The expression of Leger is worth little so long as it contains no meaning for others. Expression understood without effort is fit only for sale to Hollywood.

Under the present system of production, technical progress has required men to be specialists. The system may be justified in origin, but the people it has produced are not organically sound. The speed of life, unpleasantness of labor, tyranny of artificially stimulated human requirements, and constant fear even for outward security, have obliterated the healthy and complete man, producing generations of neurotics whose sensations function ineptly and defensively.

For the responsible man revolt is the only answer. He must unite with others. Today an economic crisis offers the immediate motive for an uprising, but the deciding factors are less simple. The revolutionist must remember the class struggle is not only about capital and the means of production, but about man, his need for a normal life, and satisfactory work which can release his natural powers. Revolution must be complete; partial ones are only symptomatic; the complete man has to be a revolutionist. Politically, culturally, and socially he must revolt.

Our political revolutionism we call scientific. In applied effort—either technical construction or creative work—we refer today to rational procedure as functionally correct. Each object must be built from the parts essential to its function. But, inseparable from this, we rule that the rationalizing of man’s activities will not permit isolated advances. Scientific, artistic, political and educational progressions must all be related. That is the nature of societal growth.

The purpose for all activity, we must remember, is man. The measures for remaking his world are not antagonistic to the measures which transform himself. In a period of revolt every alignment against tradition must be examined for contributions to man’s new society.

No revolt against tradition has been more incisive than the “abstract movement.” All conscious self-direction we can find, with Leger, the cubists, the constructivists in Russia, the Bauhaus and Werkbund in Germany, indicates that competent artists, approaching abstraction, have constituted a workshop for determining new methods for stimulating man’s sensory self. That very conception of functionalism, which was to revolutionize all modern architecture and industrial production, was detailed originally by men like Walter Gropius at the Bauhaus. It has remained for the artist, as specialist, to make paintings whose function is to integrate individuals, by clarity and courage transforming them from defensive human beings. Such an artist is Fernand Leger.

The paintings lately on view at the Modern Museum trace his development from an uncertain experimentive stage where his work lay close to the cubists and close to Cezanne. From this date on his method is clear. Instinct or reason has held Leger close to the twin aspects of all life—biological structure and functioning mechanism. His executions, since 1919, definitely represent alternate progressions in analysis and breaking down, first of natural objects, secondly of mechanical elements—then an integration of the two, resulting not seldom in a complexity which has, in turn, to be simplified. This complexity reaches excess in “The City,” which is crowded with minor contrasts and lacks a dominant. In “Composition in Blue” a similar complexity is resolved in a fashion too smooth and subtle to long content the artist. The years 1923-27 culminate in a rejection of compromise and facility for an intensive analysis of objects, as best illustrated by the water-colors and drawings.

There is evidence that Leger has had difficulty reconciling his biological and mechanistic elements. Sometimes (e.g., “Mechanical Element”) a painting functions well but is cold, sometimes (e.g., ‘‘Breakfast”), mechanistic elements are forced upon natural objects, largely distorting them. Probably the artist’s method of close reliance upon the literal object accentuates this difficulty. At any rate the object, not illustrated, not given symbolically, arrives, in 1935, with strength and simplicity we can only call monumental. “Good form, good taste and style,” as popularly understood, have no place. Whether the recognizable object will disappear altogether in Leger, ruling out temptation for trite analogies, we can not predict.

To many critics Leger appears virtually a monster, making paintings which are tools more than simple objects, impersonal and sharp, carving out a conception of a universe, cruel, disdainful and terrible in its logical functions. This view has been overdone. We are a timid people, afraid of precision and afraid of truth. More significant in the artist is his development of rhythm past its simple stage to an acute sensitivity as to the tension of contrasts among rhythms. Because this accomplishment is of such a high order and so unique, we may describe it as his personal contribution.

Such performance we might expect only from a complete man, one whose activity embraces both cultural and political revolutionism. Certainly Leger lives in no ivory tower, but is a man of the people, enjoying simple amusements, exhibiting a vast curiosity about all man’s activities, enthusiastically an ally of the workers of the world. Sergei Eisenstein has said that, of the French, no man understands the cinema more clearly than Leger. The factor in his creative success is not, however, a dissipated interest. His work is the acme of professional skill, but also professional integrity. As a specialist, his work must often fall beyond the comprehension of most people. But to the degree his paintings avoid the vapidity known as “personal taste,” which is really second-hand taste, and are anchored on biological structure—to that degree he is a leader.

It is characteristic in present society that new intellectual advances be appropriated, exploited and degraded by the class in power. Against such treachery are only the artist’s integrity and his support from a fearless intelligentsia. Also it is unfortunate that the principle implicit in our technical age of emphasizing not the single piece of work, nor the individual highest attainment, but the commonly usable type, impedes the pioneer who would extend the principle of functional building. With revolutionary educators lies the solution of these difficulties.

The revolutionist who is consistently active against the present order on all fronts welcomes progressive education as developing individuals with courage and clearness enough to reject an illogical society. The complete revolutionist, assuming as such he is healthy and capable of requisite sensory comprehension, will also welcome a new art which has, because of its functional purpose, rejected literal representation. And he will find a stimulating experience, not dissuading action, but integrating his intellectual and emotional habits toward clarity, conciseness, and precision.

The objection of some revolutionaries, only “political” and therefore incompletely mature, that all creative activity must be specific agitation, is becoming less insistent. The people in revolt are being integrated. But the waste of power involved in such a disregard for natural consistency might yet lead to catastrophe—a revolt precipitated at a tangent to the real purpose—partly against a system, but partly against man.

Freedom in Painting by Clarence Weinstock

It might be thought that in a painter so little eclectic as Leger, few elements of comparison would appear relating him to the ideas and methods of other artists. Admirable design without decorative wildness, just, never excessive color, a feeling for objects relieved of trappings and associations, whether ancient or “modern,” mark all periods of his work. His pretensions are confined to his art. They extend neither to psychology, metaphysics, symbolism, nor to the movements of society. Yet he, too, has not avoided certain corollaries that seem to accompany every insight into contemporary forms and structures. If I suggest that his paintings have now a conventional appearance, it is not to decry but to explain them. There are minor and major conventions. The former are inheritances transmitted by the Academy, failures grown remunerative by repetition. The latter are signs of—and payments for—victories won in art, struggles carried to a higher plane. Leger is on such a level. No one can rise above it without studying him and his contemporaries.

The work of Leger, like that of all abstract artists, bears a semi-idealistic relation to the visible world. Though rising out of nature, it claims a superiority, not because it represents or transforms nature into an appearance more beautiful than nature, but because it creates, object for object, something perhaps more real than the trees and tables which depend on the illusions of sight. This theoretical wish is hardly carried out in practise, however, for we soon recognize a whole series of objects which have undergone no more than dissection and superposition. They are the studio paraphernalia of modern art, the equivalents of a map, a bust, a box of gems—ropes, winches, turbines, egg-beaters and guitars. What is called the “magic of art” has worked upon them—but are they ever unrecognizable? Are Leger’s somethings ever completely themselves? Does an engine standing before us become on his canvas a new machine whose name we do not know, which merely throbs at our eyes, and is in no way connected with that metal frame which was a press or a concrete mixer? No sensitive spectator could affirm that.

Leger’s art continues an estrangement established between the artist and society at a certain point of industrial progress, a breach responsible first for the sadness and then for the revolt of modern art. It arose out of the alienation of the art patron, the capitalist, from all non-profit making activity. Use-value was identified with commodity value; what didn’t bring in the dollars was not worth anything. It was the profiteer, not Faraday or Darwin, who demanded, “What use has it?” of the artist, and who asked him if he could show something comparable to a dynamo or a grapefruit. The abuse of power on the part of capital extended from human needs to the highest forms of culture. Under it literature became introspective, philosophy romantic, and art personal. Finally, irked into arrogance, the intellectual established his own closed circles, each of which contained mysteries and fetishes, Joyce presiding over his words, Whitehead over his “extensive abstraction,” Picasso over his monstrous beauties. In its own intricate way the intellect went in for sublimated self-portraiture. It was through competing in usefulness with refrigerators. But to Leger belongs the honor of not being quite able to forget. He is still in love with his rivals.

Thus his paintings bear scars. His color is often like a coat on metal to keep it from rusting; it serves more to fix a shape than to inhabit it. As no natural object, when it reappears as an aesthetic mechanism, is necessarily different in quality from any other object, his textures are very Spartan. A composition is made of the same stuff as the root of a pear tree. His structures are uniform and sober beyond what is architecturally essential. They are animated mostly by rhythm. The machine is lively, even contains a little dancer; but in return the mechanic becomes one of the wheels he was polishing. Leger has built upon two images whose imaginative, if not plastic possibilities, can soon be exhausted, namely, living nature and man, seen as mechanism, and the machine come to life in the world of art. The individuality of objects known and understood, the enormous variety of meanings in nature and society, are reduced to one structural conception arrived at by an aesthetic approach to the materials of science.

It would be absurd to discuss Leger’s limitations, compared say to Picasso, as though they were due to lack of craftsmanship, insensibility to texture or poor fantasy. His limits are self-imposed, the products of a disciplined intention. But would it be true to say that he has freed art from subject matter, from the deceptions inherent in humanity? Painting can accomplish that only when the subject matter is itself free, that is, when objects need no longer be seen in relationships that in turn enslave the artist and us, when they are so bountiful to all working humanity that everyone can look at them for pure pleasure, in and for themselves. Leger knows what might have freed us. Perhaps he is asking: “What will?”

Art Front was published by the Artists Union in New York between November 1934 and December 1937. Its roots were with the Artists Committee of Action formed to defend Diego Rivera’s Man at the Crossroads mural soon to be destroyed by Nelson Rockefeller. Herman Baron, director of the American Contemporary Art gallery, was managing editor in collaboration with the Artists Union in a project largely politically aligned with the Communist Party USA.. An editorial committee of sixteen with eight from each group serving. Those from the Artists Committee of Action were Hugo Gellert, Stuart Davis, Zoltan Hecht, Lionel S. Reiss, Hilda Abel, Harold Baumbach, Abraham Harriton, Rosa Pringle and Jennings Tofel, while those from the Artists Union were Boris Gorelick, Katherine Gridley, Ethel Olenikov, Robert Jonas, Kruckman, Michael Loew, C. Mactarian and Max Spivak.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/parties/cpusa/art-front/v2n02-jan-1936-Art-Front.pdf