Fernand Lager is the only major modern artist to choose modernity itself as his subject. From his early series Contrastes de formes of 1913-14--the first fully abstract works to emerge from Cubism--through his paintings of construction workers from the late 1940s and early 1950s, his enduring subject was the pulse and dynamism of everyday life. Lager saw the 20th century environment as a "state of contrasts," a condition that he translated into art through forceful juxtaposition of shape, color, and line. His attempt to reconcile the formal concerns of artmaking with issues of social responsibility continues to be relevant to the art world of today. Accompanying texts recount Lager's experience of and interest in America and America's interest in him; explore refractions of Lager's interests in the work of more recent artists; and discuss Lager's ambition to make an art reflecting the "new visual state" of modern life. An illustrated chronology tells the story of the artist's life, focusing on his time in America, the plate section is complemented by a series of short essays tracing the formal and thematic developments in his art, and a selected bibliography and detailed exhibition history complete the book.This book was published to accompany the 1998 retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Fernand Leger

Arts & Photography

Affron, Matthew

Hauptman, Jodi

Lanchner, Carolyn

Léger, Fernand

Individual Artists

The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Fernand Lager is the only major modern artist to choose modernity itself as his subject. From his early series Contrastes de formes of 1913-14--the first fully abstract works to emerge from Cubism--through his paintings of construction workers from the late 1940s and early 1950s, his enduring subject was the pulse and dynamism of everyday life. Lager saw the 20th century environment as a "state of contrasts," a condition that he translated into art through forceful juxtaposition of shape, color, and line. His attempt to reconcile the formal concerns of artmaking with issues of social responsibility continues to be relevant to the art world of today. Accompanying texts recount Lager's experience of and interest in America and America's interest in him; explore refractions of Lager's interests in the work of more recent artists; and discuss Lager's ambition to make an art reflecting the "new visual state" of modern life. An illustrated chronology tells the story of the artist's life, focusing on his time in America, the plate section is complemented by a series of short essays tracing the formal and thematic developments in his art, and a selected bibliography and detailed exhibition history complete the book.This book was published to accompany the 1998 retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Caught between description and dream, the felt and the imagined, French artist Odilon Redon, whose career bridged the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, transformed the natural world into nightmarish visions and bizarre fantasies. Closely allied with the Symbolist movement, Redon offered his own interpretations of literary, biblical and mythological subjects; created a universe of strange hybrid creatures; and presented landscape in a singular way: we see grinning disembodied teeth, smiling spiders, melancholic floating faces, winged chariots, unfamiliar plant life, and velvety black or colored swirls of atmosphere. With a recent gift from the Ian Woodner family, The Museum of Modern Art is now the site of the most significant body of the artist's work outside France, and this book will showcase the full range of Redon's varied oeuvre--charcoal "noirs," luminous pastels, richly textured canvases, literary collaborations and experiments in printmaking--and will illuminate the hold his particular kind of Modernism has had on both twentieth-century and contemporary artists.

Beyond The Visible: The Art Of Odilon Redon

History & Criticism

Ellsworth Kelly: Colors for a Large Wall: MoMA One on One Series

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Books by Hauptman, Jodi