LEGER IN ROUSES POINT: A CHRONOLOGY -- In March 1943, Cubist painter Fernand Leger discovers Rouses Point when his train is delayed for several hours on a journey to Montreal. “The Champlain Valley, with its fresh green orchards and French-speaking population, bore a resemblance to Normandy which captivated Leger.” (1) He returns July 1 of that year and spends the summer at an old farm. Abandoned farm machinery overgrown with vegetation inspire many new compositions for paintings.
In July 1944, Leger begins his summer again in Rouses Point spending time with his friend Siegfried Giedion who was writing his book, Mechanization Takes Command. In August Leger works on The Girl with the Prefabricated Heart, a sequence for Hans Richter’s film Dreams that Money Can Buy.
“By 1944 Leger had completed the Divers series, wherein figures are strewn through the picture space with top and bottom, hands and feet virtually interchangeable.”(2) “That summer too (1944), Leger was continuing to develop the spectrum of circus personalities that would fill the enormous canvases of his last decade, such as La Grande Parade (1954).” (3)
“Among the sketches I saw at Rouses Point were some of a subject Leger had broached a couple of years earlier, jauntily attired cyclists and their machines – partly inspired, he said, by the American taste for outdoor sports and eye-catching clothes.”(3), as seen in Léger’s La Grande Julie (1945).
“A special atmosphere emanates from the group of works, frequently called the American Landscape series, created during Leger’s summers in Rouses Point. All of Leger’s American oeuvre displays a pictorial area densely covered with compositional elements. The group of Rouses Point landscapes is no exception. In Tree in Ladder (1943) manmade objects are intertwined with and devoured by the overgrown vegetation.”(5)
Leger spends his last summer in Rouses Point in 1945 before returning to France at the end of WWII.
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(1) Kotik, Charlotta. “Léger and America.” In Fernand Leger. New York: Abbeville Press, 1983, p 56.
(2) James, Martin. “Leger at Rouses Point, 1944: A Memoir” The Burlington Magazine, vol. 130, no.1021
(April 1988), p 281.
(3) ibid
(4) ibid
(5) ibid p 57.
