Sospeso presents French painter Fernand Léger's celebrated  experimental film Ballet méchanique, with Michael Nyman's live score, at the spring 2003 multimedia concert.

Léger was born into a peasant family in a small town in Normandy. He served a two-year apprenticeship in an architect's office at Caen and then, in 1900, went to work in Paris, first as an architectural draftsman and later as a retoucher of photographs. In 1903 he enrolled in the Paris École des Arts Décoratifs and, although failing to get into the École des Beaux-Arts, began to study under two of its professors as an unofficial pupil. A large retrospective of the work of Paul Cézanne at the Paris Salon d'Automne of 1907 influenced him profoundly.

In 1908, the year Cubism began, Léger rented a studio at La Ruche (“The Beehive”), an artists' settlement on the edge of Montparnasse, and there he soon found himself in the centre of several avant-garde tendencies. Eventually, he got to know the painters Robert Delaunay, Marc Chagall, and Chaim Soutine; the sculptors Jacques Lipchitz, Henri Laurens, and Alexander Archipenko; and the poets Guillaume Apollinaire, Max Jacob, Blaise Cendrars, and Pierre Reverdy. Through the poets, in particular, there was a connection with the Cubist movement, the early centre of which was in Montmartre, where Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque had their studios.

Léger’s wartime experience encouraged him in the early 1920s to explore diverse media in order to reach the wide range of people that he had encountered during his years in the trenches. He became interested in printmaking around this time, although after a brief period of activity this interest waned, and also in book illustration as a vehicle to disseminate his ideas to wider audiences. Another means was the cinema, which Léger had particularly admired ever since he had first encountered Chaplin’s films during the war. In 1920 he illustrated a book of poems devoted to Chaplin, Ivan Goll’s Die Chaplinade (Dresden and Berlin, 1920). In the following year he assisted Blaise Cendrars, who was working for film maker Abel Gance on La Roue. Léger appears to have participated in the creation, with Cendrars, of the fast-paced montage sections of the film, which received considerable attention in the press. Léger produced a promotional poster for the film and wrote an article in which he celebrated Gance’s use of a mechanical object—the wheel of a train—as one of the principal characters in the film. Stimulated by his appreciation for Gance’s achievement, Léger embarked on his own films. Initially he proposed several versions of an animated cartoon of Charlot Cubiste (Cubist Chaplin). Then he created sets for the laboratory section of Marcel L’Herbier’s film L’Inhumaine (1923).

Ballet mécanique (1924) was the first film project realized principally by Léger. He was assisted technically by the American film maker Dudley Murphy, who at the suggestion of Ezra Pound had approached Léger with a proposal to make a film together. Ballet mécanique consisted of a rapid succession of mechanical images alternating with close-ups of faces, body parts, pots and pans, abstract shapes, and walking and swinging women. Léger wrote that in it he had set out to prove that it was possible to make a visually interesting film using only simple objects and fragments of objects, ‘of a mechanical element, of rhythmic repetitions copied from certain objects of a commonplace nature and “artistic” in the least possible degree’. He was especially excited by the possibilities presented by montage. He also investigated current work on synchronization in the hope of marrying the American composer Georges Antheil’s highly experimental score for the film with the images on the screen. Although synchronization was never successfully realized for the original version of the film, the nitrate version of which is now housed at the Anthology Film Archives, New York and which was first shown on the opening night of the Internationale Ausstellung Neuer Theatertechnik in Vienna in September 1924, the film was often screened with live performances of the score, and later versions feature it as a soundtrack. A fourth vehicle for Léger’s exploration of diverse media was the stage. Léger was fascinated by performance and the possibilities inherent in the visual artist’s collaboration with the choreographer, director, composer and writer. In 1922 his abstract geometric sets and costumes were essential components of the production by the Ballets Suédois of Skating Rink, based on Charlie Chaplin’s film The Rink (1918). In 1923 Léger designed elaborate sets and costumes based on thorough studies of African sculpture for La Création du monde, a Ballets Suédois production based on Cendrars’s collection of creation myths in his Anthologie nègre (1920).

Léger’s collaborative projects culminated in the 1920s with his work for architectural settings. For the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes (1925) in Paris Léger was commissioned with Robert Delaunay to produce murals and exhibit easel paintings as part of the décor of Robert Mallet-Stevens’s Pavillon de Tourisme. For the same exhibition Léger exhibited his mural paintings (his most abstract works) along with canvases by Amédée Ozenfant in Le Corbusier’s Pavillon de L’Esprit Nouveau; Léger subscribed in part to Le Corbusier’s and Ozenfant’s notion of Purism and contributed to the journal L’Esprit nouveau, with which they were associated. These architecturally specific projects were part of Léger’s overall interest in mural painting and his concern for the role of paintings in architecture, particularly in domestic settings. His views were no doubt influenced by his exposure to the ideas of De Stijl, particularly those conveyed through the exhibition of architectural work by this group at his dealer’s Galerie de l’Effort Moderne in 1923. Léger advocated some type of agreement between the architect, the painter and the wall regarding colour, which he believed was a vital component in architecture and absent from much current work. Painters, he argued, could determine its place in architecture better than anyone else.

From Britannica (paragraphs 2 and 3) and Grove Art.