‘The King of Hearts’

Location

Country: UK
City: London
Place: Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, Whitehall

This lithograph by Fernand Léger is composed of colourful foliage and floral shapes against a blue and nude backdrop. Three painting cards in the foreground include a King of Hearts. The work is from a period when Leger had set aside cubism and was looking at more simplified treatments of modern subject matter – a practice that led to many viewing him as a forerunner of Pop Art. This particular print was made as part of the 1940s schools print scheme. The scheme, the brainchild of arts campaigner Brenda Rawnsley, made high-quality contemporary art available to schools in England, where children, by virtue of their family circumstances, would be highly unlikely to visit art galleries. While the scheme involved mainly British artists, Rawnsley herself flew to France in 1947 to convince Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Henri Matisse, Raol Dufy and Fernand Leger to produce lithographs for the scheme. The prints were all produced in the UK by the printers Cowells, of Ispwich, who used innovative plastic lithographic plates.

Fernand Léger was born in Normandy, France and grew up in a family of cattle farmers. He worked as an architectural apprentice in Caen before moving to Paris in 1900, where he supported himself as an architectural draughtsman while he studied painting. He began exhibiting work in Paris. An emphasis on geometry and drawing made itself felt in his work after he saw a retrospective of the painter Cezanne’s work. By 1911 he had been identified as a Cubist whose more tubular forms led him to be bracketed under ‘tubism’. His paintings had become more abstract but the First World War, and his experience in the French Army, was to completely shift his artistic trajectory. He began painting more mechanical imagery after the war. This formal clarity and subject matter reflected the ‘return to order’ seen in the arts in the immediate post-war period. By 1927 however, his work had become more organic with more irregular forms. He travelled to the US and exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1935. He remained in the US during the Second World War, painting, among other things, landscapes with industrial forms – a response to his observations of industrial refuse in the landscape of the USA. Inspired also by the neon lighting of New York City, he began painting figures and objects juxtaposed with bands of colour. He returned to France in 1945 and joined the Communist Party. His work had started becoming flatter and more stylised. In the years before his death in 1955, he had expanded his practice further to include book illustration, murals, stained-glass windows, mosaics and set and costume design. His works feature in many key collections from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to Tate Modern in London.

Places

Subjects

cards, still life, plant, King

Materials & Techniques

colour lithograph

Artist

Fernand Léger (1881 - 1955)

Title

‘The King of Hearts’

Series Title

School Prints

Date

1949

Medium

Colour lithograph

Acquisition

Purchased from Editions Alecto, 1967

Inscription

br: F.LÉGER / 'The King of Hearts' by Fernand Léger, S.P. 25. / Published by School Prints Ltd and printed in Great Britain by W.S. Cowell Ltd.

GAC number

7796