NADIA LÉGER INVESTIGATES THE MUSÉE MAILLOL
The Musée Maillol devotes a retrospective to the creative destiny of Nadia Léger. This exhibition, halfway between art and history, explores this female figure of twentieth-century art.

ITINERARY OF AN ARTIST IN THE MAKING

From her native Belarus to Paris, Nadia Khodossievitch-Léger (1904-1982) traversed the 20th century with a single watchword: avant-gardism. Born into a peasant family and driven by a passion for art, this child of the revolution shaped her style according to the teachings and encounters that marked her little-known destiny. An adept of collective adventures, she welcomes with humility and intelligence the influences of the artistic communities she comes into contact with. As a result, her art has embraced, successively or simultaneously, a wide range of genres and currents. In Smolensk, alongside a series of charcoal portraits of women, Nadia produced her first abstract works under the guidance of teachers Wladyslaw Strzeminski and Kasimir Malevitch. She continued her training in Warsaw, Poland, where she joined 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. The purist experiments of Amédée Ozenfant and the biomorphic experiments of Hans Arp infused her creation. Until her decisive encounter with Fernand Léger, which turned her conception of art on its head. The result? A body of work as prolific as it is eclectic, in which it's hard to discern any unity of style or inspiration!

RUB SHOULDERS WITH THE GREATEST

With over 150 works, the exhibition "Nadia Léger. Une femme d'avant-garde" aims to ensure her rightful place in the history of modern art, by anchoring her work in the political, cultural and attitudinal history of her time. An emblematic female figure of twentieth-century art, her work has nevertheless disappeared from the collective memory. This is undoubtedly due to the fact that Nadia constantly evolved in the shadow of the greats, foremost among them her husband and mentor Fernand Léger. A student at the Atelier Léger from 1928 onwards, she quickly adopted her master's new realism in pure colors. We need only compare their portraits and still lifes to observe this stylistic kinship. However, it would be unfair to reduce Nadia's art to that of an imitator. Through the individualization of figures with expressive faces and her compositions of intimate objects, the artist blazes her own trail. A path that she would constantly reinvent through contact with the avant-garde artists of her time. A close friend of Chagall, and close to Braque, Picasso and Mondrian, she never hesitated to confront her art with that of her contemporaries, notably at the Atelier Léger. From Cubism to Suprematism, from Suprematism to Realism and back to Suprematism again, her pictorial work, with its plural identity, is in constant tension between abstraction and figuration. A signature that changes with the stages of his creative life...

MILITANT PAINTING

An exceptional woman, by turns a prolific painter, magazine editor, collaborator with her husband Fernand Léger, Resistance fighter, museum builder and fervent Communist activist, Nadia Léger intimately linked her art to the great battles of her century. Her pantheon of effigies of politicians, artists, writers and cosmonauts, created between 1944 and 1971, bears witness to this. These recognizable faces against a background of solid colors are icons that reveal the artist's role models and sources of inspiration. While some of these portraits graced the congresses of the French Communist Party, others became monumental mosaics adorning public places in the major cities of the USSR. A member of the Communist Party since 1932, Nadia's militancy really took off during the Occupation. Her involvement in the Resistance in 1941 marked the start of a series of militant portraits, similar to the monumental portraits of martyrs and victory figures she exhibited at the Liberation. At the end of the war, Nadia supported the policies of the Communist Party with her actions and her paintbrush. Under the label of New French Realism, the scenes Nadia painted, such as her series in praise of workers, Builders (1950-1953) and Miners (1950-1953), became relays for Communist thought. In the 1960s, Nadia was fascinated by the conquest of space in the midst of the Cold War. An artist in a perpetual state of flux, she returned to the abstraction of geometric forms and neo-suprematism. There's no doubt that if life had allowed her a few more years, Nadia Khodossievitch-Léger would still have been able to surprise us.

"NADIA LÉGER. UNE FEMME D'AVANT-GARDE"
MUSÉE MAILLOL 61, RUE DE GRENELLE, PARIS 7E
FROM NOVEMBER 8, 2024 TO MARCH 23, 2025
MUSEEMAILLOL.COM