In 1919, when the French modernist Fernand Léger created The City, a monumental painting around which the Philadelphia Museum of Art bases the interdisciplinary exhibition “Léger: Modern Art and the Metropolis,” he was a man who had recently returned from fighting in the First World War. The experience profoundly affected his work, and he began incorporating into his paintings mechanical forms that both embody the industrialization of warfare and seem to resemble the robotic prosthetics soldiers wore after losing limbs in battle.
In The City, some of these mechanical forms are represented in a bustling metropolis of bridges, buildings, radio towers, and billboards—not necessarily Paris, where Léger lived, though Paris was itself going through a re-birth. Visually, the various elements are represented in abstract forms that refer both to Cubism and to the exuberant upheavals in culture and fashion after the war.
The exhibition has 179 works by both Léger and such contemporaries as Le Corbusier, Piet Mondrian, Francis Picabia, Gerald Murphy, and Man Ray. Consisting of film projections, theater designs, architectural models, and print and advertising designs, it highlights the way such artists tried to popularize modern art by engaging with various forms of mass media. Taken together, the works present the artists’ vision for a new world.
Through January 5, 2014, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art; philamuseum.org
