Léger: Modern Art and the Metropolis
Philadelphia Museum of Art
October 14, 2013-January 5, 2014
This fall's special exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum Léger: Modern Art and the Metropolis offers a multi-media exploration of the career of French modernist Fernand Léger (1881-1955). Curated by Anna Vallye, a postdoctoral fellow at the museum and an alumna of Columbia's Art History & Archaeology Ph.D. program, the show brings together paintings, films, architectural models, and other designs by the artist to offer new insight into his engagement with urban environments. Avery Classics loaned many items to the show, which will travel to the Museo Correr in Venice this January. These loans included ten plates from L'Architecture Vivante, the avant-garde architectural serial edited by Jean Badovici that was published in Paris throughout the 1920s and early 1930s. Classics also loaned an issue of the magazine L'Esprit Nouveau and the catalog from Friedrich Kiesler's Internationale Ausstellung neuer Theatertechnik exhibition in Vienna in 1924.
Image Credit: Fernand Léger. Fresco design for a music hall (left) and Exterior fresco design for a hotel (right). Plate 9 from L'Architecture Vivante, Fall/Winter 1924. Avery Classics AB Ar433. Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University.