Born in Argentan, France, Léger moved to Paris in 1900 and worked as an architectural draughtsman to support himself after apprenticing with an architect in Caen. Despite being rejected from the École des Beaux-Arts, he started attending classes there in 1903. Impressionism was a major influence on his early works. However, his exposure to Pablo Picasso's and Georges Braque's Cubism, as well as Paul Cézanne's retrospective at the Salon d'Automne in 1907, had a profound effect on the evolution of his own style. Léger began to restrict his use of colour to the primaries and black and white between 1911 and 1914, as his work grew more and more abstract. He became interested in painting cities and machines following World War I. Motivated by contemporary living, Léger promoted a "new realism" that was sensitive to the beauty of modern society. He incorporated mechanical themes and urban signals into his compositions while reducing the standardised human figure to geometry. Inspired by the vision of art for everyone, he undertook a number of monumental project near the end of his life and was able to witness the opening of the Fernand Léger National Museum in Biot just before his death.
Born in Argentan, France, Léger moved to Paris in 1900 and worked as an architectural draughtsman to support himself after apprenticing with an architect in Caen. Despite being rejected from the École des Beaux-Arts, he started attending classes there in 1903. Impressionism was a major influence on his early works. However, his exposure to Pablo Picasso's and Georges Braque's Cubism, as well as Paul Cézanne's retrospective at the Salon d'Automne in 1907, had a profound effect on the evolution of his own style. Léger began to restrict his use of colour to the primaries and black and white between 1911 and 1914, as his work grew more and more abstract. He became interested in painting cities and machines following World War I. Motivated by contemporary living, Léger promoted a "new realism" that was sensitive to the beauty of modern society. He incorporated mechanical themes and urban signals into his compositions while reducing the standardised human figure to geometry. Inspired by the vision of art for everyone, he undertook a number of monumental project near the end of his life and was able to witness the opening of the Fernand Léger National Museum in Biot just before his death.