Léger Et Les Nouveaux Réalismes Les Collections Du Mamac À Biot

Exhibition at the Musée national Fernand Léger, Biot, 15 June - 18 November 2024

Fascinated by progress, speed, lights and the advertising slogans that punctuate urban spaces, Fernand Léger (1881-1955) took part in the modernist revolution by framing reality in its most prosaic forms, and influenced several generations of artists after him, including those of the Nouveau Réalisme, a group created in 1960 around the art critic Pierre Restany, a great admirer of the painter.
What Léger and these artists have in common is that they renewed artistic creation by reappropriating the real world and often taking a critical and political look at the society of their time.

This exhibition catalogue offers an aesthetic, thematic and formal dialogue between the works of Léger and those of artists affiliated with the Nouveau Réalisme movement. It brings together 110 works by Léger, Yves Klein, Niki de Saint Phalle, Arman, César, Daniel Spoerri, Raymond Hains, Martial Raysse, and the American "New Realists" who, like Roy Lichtenstein, Keith Haring and Robert Indiana, flourished from the early 1960s onwards, and who also share an aesthetic filiation with the visionary work of Fernand Léger, whose approach was profoundly influenced by his travels and then his exile in the United States from 1940 to 1945.