Fernanrd Léger et les nouveaux réalismes

This catalogue, published to coincide with the exhibition ´Tous Léger! with Niki de Saint Phalle, Yves Klein, Martial Raysse, Keith Haring... ´in Paris at the Musée du Luxembourg from 19 March to 20 July 2025. Fernand Léger (1881-1955) was fascinated by progress, speed, lights and the advertising slogans that punctuated urban spaces, and took part in the modernist revolution by framing reality in its most prosaic forms. Through this exhibition and the accompanying catalogue, an aesthetic, thematic and formal dialogue emerges between his works and those of artists affiliated to the Nouveau Réalisme movement. A fervent admirer of Léger´s work, with whom he shared a rejection of socialist realism socialist realism, the art critic Pierre Restany is said to have named the movement after the painter, who used the term several times in his theoretical writings. Nouveau Réalisme brought together a dozen artists who appropriated reality through a series of actions that were both politically and artistically critical of society in the immediate post-war period. Objects, materials and tools hitherto outside the realm of painting were captured in their most banal realities, hijacked and elevated to the status of works of art. For these artists, it was a question of revealing the beauty of everyday life and demonstrating that, if painting is still possible in this rapidly changing society, it must involve a necessary and radical renewal of pictorial means. Besides works by Yves Klein, Niki de Saint Phalle, Arman, César, Daniel Spoerri, Raymond Hains and Martial Raysse, the exhibition will also feature work by the American ´New Realists´ who, like Roy Lichtenstein, Keith Haring and Robert Indiana, flourished from the early 1960s onwards, whether through Pop Art or the resurgence of assemblage art. They too have an aesthetic link with the visionary work of Fernand Léger, whose approach was profoundly influenced by his travels and exile in the United States from 1940 to 1945.