PARIS.- An early immigrant to France from her native Russia, Nadia Khodossievitch-Léger (1904-1982) was director of the Atelier of Fernand Léger - her mentor-, the builder of museums dedicated to his work, a magazine editor, a member of the French Resistance and an intimate of the greatest artists of the 20th century. Above all, she was a painter.
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And then she virtually disappeared from the collective memory. A number of reasons have been put forward for this relative obscurity. Some seem less convincing than others. One of these is her communism, which is admittedly of the Stalinist kind, extreme and unshakeable. But so many others did not suffer from it, on the contrary, at a time when communism was not just another ideology, but an intellectual fashion and an attitude.
She was also a foreigner, but then again, most of the École de Paris was made up of foreigners.
She was also a woman in a Parisian artistic milieu which, unlike other major centres of the avant-garde such as Russia and Germany, remained rather patriarchal and, however progressive it wanted to be, not free of sexism.
However, two disadvantages seemed to be decisive. One was the shadow cast by Fernand Léger. She herself was aware of this: ‘Léger is a giant like Picasso, Braque and Matisse. I lived next to him... crushed...’. The other is to be found in her work itself. It is difficult to discern any unity of style or inspiration. A close friend of Chagall, who was also close to Braque and Picasso, worked in so many genres, successively or at the same time, and was part of so many currents: Suprematism, Constructivism, Cubism, New French Realism, Suprematism again…
Nadia Léger is like a sponge, moving from one style to another according to her whims, influences and ideological imperatives. Her signature, changing according to the stages of her creative life and her marriages, bears witness to a plural identity reflected in the variety of her work.
This retrospective follows Nadia Léger's long and rich career as she travelled from Russia to France, where her talent reached maturity. The exhibition explores the avant-gardes in which she evolved, compares her work with that of her contemporaries - in particular Fernand Léger and the students at the Atelier - and draws connections between her art and her political and social commitments. Nadia Léger. A Woman of the Avant-Garde aims to give her the status she deserves in the history of modern art, by anchoring her work in the political, cultural and affective history of her time.
Nadia's Pantheon
From Tolstoyto Chagall and Stalin, these effigies ofpoliticians, artists, writers and cosmonauts form Nadia Khodossievitch- Léger's personal pantheon. These recognisable faces against a background of solid colours are icons that reveal the artist's role models and sources of inspiration. These were preparatory studies made between 1944 and 1971, and were intended to be enlarged. Some of the monumental portraits produced adorned the congresses of the French Communist Party (PCF), while others were translated into monumental mosaics and then donated and installed in public places in the major cities of the USSR.
Smolensk, Warsaw, Paris
Encountering the Avant-Garde
Oscillating between abstraction and figuration, Nadia's early works illustrate the journey of an artist seeking her way through the maze of avant-garde movements.
From her native Belarus to Paris, this child of the revolution, born into a peasant family and driven by a passion for art, shaped her style through teachings and encounters.
In Smolensk, alongside a series of charcoal portraits of women, Nadia produced her first abstract works with teachers Władysław Strzemiński and Kasimir Malevitch. She continued her training in Warsaw, Poland, where she was part of the Cubist, Suprematist and Constructivist circles.
As soon as she arrived in Paris, the European capital of the arts, in 1925, she frequented the artists of the Montparnasse district and took part in collective adventures such as ‘Cercle et Carré’. The purist experiments of Amédée Ozenfant and the biomorphic experiments of Hans Arp infused her work. Thanks to her numerous contacts, she ensured the circulation of avant-garde ideas between France and Poland.
‘I let loose my imagination using anti-geometric shapes in space.’ --- Fernand Léger as a beacon Dialogue with the ‘master’
Nadia's encounter with the ‘magnificent brute’ in the 1920s acted like ‘a rope tossed to save her’.
Leafing through the magazine L'Esprit nouveau, which was circulating in Eastern Europe, Nadia found a new guide in Fernand Léger. She became his pupil in 1928 and never left his side.
The ‘master’ and his ‘Tartar’ were close collaborators, and both shared the same ambition: to contribute to the development of a social art form that could be seen as much on easels as on the façades of buildings. From 1937, Nadia adopted the ‘Léger style’, a new realism using pure colours to depict modern life.
Comparing portraits and still lifes by the two artists highlights this stylistic kinship - roots and biomorphic forms, black circles, tubular arms and ‘colour outside’. However, Nadia's art is not simply that of an imitator. Through the individualisation of figures with expressive faces and her compositions of intimate objects, Nadia charts her own course.
The Atelier Léger
The laboratory of Modernity
With nearly 350 artists enrolled between 1924 and 1955, the Atelier de Fernand Léger was one of the most important modern art academies in Paris.
A place for teaching and commissioned collective work, the Atelier Léger welcomed artists of all nationalities. From Montparnasse to Montmartre, its activities survived the war thanks to the loyal support of Nadia Khodossievitch, who went from being a student to an assistant, and the painter Georges Bauquier. Robert Doisneau's photographic report highlights the role of Nadia, who taught the students in Fernand's absence.
‘It's extremely free here, I accept everything’, said the master in 1949. Although he raised the standard of realism, Fernand Léger accepted all tendencies in his studio, including the abstract school. The presentation of a sample of works by students who were influenced by the painter's style during their time at the Atelier, only to emancipate themselves from it later on, offers an insight into the legacy of Léger's art and vision.
‘Don't be afraid to come under my influence, for a while at least [...] It's up to you to say “shoo to Léger” and retain from your time at the Atelier all that you consider useful for the development of your personality.’ --- Fernand Léger to his students
The resistant
Militant painting
A member of the Communist Party since 1932, Nadia's militancy grew stronger during the Occupation.
‘As long as there is even one German soldier left on French soil, there will be war! After becoming a liaison officer for the Francs-tireurs et partisans - immigrant labour, her involvement in the Resistance in 1941 led to the creation of a series of portraits of activists.
First and foremost, her self-portraits, with their confident or tortured expressions, were a manifesto of the struggle against the occupying forces. As well as portraying a combative self, she personified missing Fernand (in exile in New York at the time) by depicting him and the hopes of the Resistance by representing her daughter Wanda. At the Liberation, she honoured the ‘party of those shot’ by decorating communist rallies with monumental portraits of martyrs and figures of victory.
Serving the Party
Art and propaganda
Like many intellectuals and artists - both sympathisers and activists - at the end of the war, Nadia supported the Party's policy with her actions and her paintbrush.
Bolstered by this support, in 1947 the PCF defined the guidelines for its cultural policy. On the model of socialist realism in the USSR, a party art form that was ‘national in form and socialist in content’ was created under the label of New French Realism.
From then on, Nadia's painted scenes became relays of communist ideology. Like propaganda posters and photographs, the clear, legible pictorial message must unite the people around model ideas and personalities. Glorified, the painted figures - Stalin, Lenin, heroines, workers and athletes - formed an inventory of socialist archetypes. In admiration of this body of work, which brought together portraits, praise for work and appeals for peace, Fernand wrote to Nadia in 1950: ‘We have paved the way for new realism - it is up to you, dear Nadia, and to the young people around you, to create a great pictorial era independent of previous ones’.
The ghost of Malevitch
A return to the avant-garde
In the 1960s, the conquest of space at the height of the Cold War fascinated a generation of artists.
From design, with the Panton chair, to music, with astronaut Major Tom in David Bowie's Space Oddity, and fashion, with Pierre Cardin's futuristic collections, the ‘Space Age’ spanned every creative field.
The Russian exploit of the Vostok 1 mission on 12 April 1961, embodied by cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, marked a turning point in Nadia's work. She gradually returned to abstraction, enclosing her figures in geometric shapes before allowing them to occupy the space of the painting on their own. To depict the turmoil of the stars, she invoked Malevitch, in whom she saw a prophet of her time, and returned to her compositions from 1919-1922. This ‘neo-suprematism’, which flourished as much on canvas as in the applied arts (jewellery, furniture, tapestry, sculpture, mosaics), alongside a series of monumental mosaic portraits, is the ultimate variation in a body of work in perpetual effervescence.
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