The Books of Fernand Léger: Illustration and Inscription

Abstract

Léger evolves from the early La fin du monde (where he imaginatively appropriates Cendrar’s text) to his picture-poems in Les illuminations (where he merely selects passages from Rimbaud’s text) to his own created text in Le Cirque, freely calligraphed and lithographed. He avoids the mimetic use of literary elements in order to subvert the conventions of the illustrated book and he subordinates meaning to a graphic interplay where word and image can, on occasion, become interchangeable. Already in La fin du monde, movement, especially of a circular nature, endows his book with a dynamics of its own. In Le Cirque, certain repetitive motifs develop mobility on a more structural level. Léger has thus subverted the borderline between readable and nonreadable, lyric and painterly. The scene of representation, verbal and visual, has undergone so drastic a transformation that the poetic and painterly signatures of the artist have become indistinguishable.