Does the name Nadia Khodossievitch-Léger sound familiar? She has a Wikipedia page, but her second husband, the French artist Fernand Léger, has a much longer Wikipedia page. Wikipedia may not be a reliable barometer of true cultural importance, but it reflects the fact that this artist couple has never been assigned the same cultural importance, both on and off the internet. Not only was Nadia instrumental in the teaching and legacy of Fernand Léger and his inspiration, but she was also a generator of ideas in her own right, often boldly focusing on herself and other politically engaged women of her time. Why would Fernand erase or even cover up Nadia?
“Nadia Léger: An Avant-garde Woman” presents more than 150 works at the Musée Maillol in Paris as compensation for another overlooked female artist. Nadia Léger’s work is not necessarily timeless – if anything, it is very much rooted in its time, and tinged with communist fervor – but it transcends patriarchal norms to feature female activists and intellectual-centered, including herself.
The exhibition text states that Nadia “virtually disappeared from collective memory” and then offers hypotheses for this omission, including that sexism was clearly pervasive but her style lacked “coherence” (after suprematism, constructivism and cubism, which of course would never have been dismissed if she were a man). There is also a hint in the exhibition whether her Stalinist-influenced communism might have been an obstacle, although it is not elaborated on. The fact that many French and foreign intellectuals at the time were attracted to communism and the party’s belief in working-class left-wing values for human progress did not particularly suggest Nadia, although many eventually left in the second half of the 20th century the party. Nadia remains in the party.
The most likely reason why she is so little known is that, from an art historical perspective, her famous husband outshone her. A museum named after him, the Musée National Fernand Léger, was opened in southern France in 1960 and became a national institution in 1969. Nadia stood smiling broadly in a fur coat and headscarf. , she was crucial in promoting her husband’s hereditary presence.
Nadia (1904-1982) was born in Russia (now Belarus) and studied with Kazimir Malevich before moving to Poland. One of her earliest exhibited works was supreme girl (c. 1921-22), depicts the silhouette of a girl seated against a background of geometric blue and red shapes, highlighting her interest in feminine subjects and abstract compositions.
When she arrived in Paris in 1925, she mingled with the Montparnasse artists (she later painted portraits of Chagall and Picasso). She sold her first painting, an experimental abstract oil on canvas, Nu——To the famous collector Marie-Laure de Noailles. First seen Fernand Léger’s work in issue 4 of the magazine The New Spirit: An International Review of Aesthetics (a short-lived publication launched by Le Corbusier in 1920), she became his student at the Ecole Moderne in 1928, then his assistant by 1932, and then his wife by 1952. Lasting from 1924 to 1955 (with the exception of the war years and from 1939 to 1945, when Fernand Léger was in New York), the exhibition showcases images taken by French photographer Robert Doisneau Black-and-white archival photo of a bustling studio, in which men and women hunker down in paint-striped smocks.
By 1937, the styles of Nadia and Fernand Léger had become inextricably intertwined – both were characterized by biomorphic forms – and they imitated each other: his style Untitled [Nadia] A 1953 gouache and India ink painting depicts her with her left hand pressed to her cheek, flat patches of color floating across her face, shoulders and wrists; her oil on canvas Fernand Léger portraitIn the 1940 work, he poses solemnly and suitably in front of an amorphous black form that looks like a knotted ginger root.
The exhibition features works by Fernand Léger – his adam and eve (1934) Biblical figures on white background with outline shapes on the left, red vase (1948-1950) depicts a woman clutching a container – the two styles are clearly inseparable. Nadia painted a self-portrait in 1948 that was a direct response to Fernand’s 1935 portrait of the American collector Maud Dale – Two Women Both had their hands folded on their chests, their arms bare, and they were wearing green dresses with white trim, standing in front of red. In Fernand’s work, the figure in the painting looks pale and feeble at the corner of the picture. In Nadia’s self-portraits, she fearlessly captures the viewer’s gaze with sly confidence.
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Nadia was a member of the French Resistance and she portrayed other courageous female activists such as Danielle Casanova (who was deported to Auschwitz and murdered) and Betty Al Betty Albrecht (tortured and committed suicide in Fresnes prison). After the war, her communist ideology emerged in her work and her loyalty to the Soviet Union became known – she repeatedly painted Lenin and his wife Nadezhda Krupp through gouache collages and lithographs Skaya, as well as Marx and Stalin. In the 1960s, she dedicated her work (and opened her home) to astronaut Yuri Gagarin, the first to fly on the Vostok 1 mission in 1961 Man Orbiting the Earth; in an abstract cosmic painting from 1963, she depicts his face floating on a black background, flanked by orange spheres and gray rectangles.
It was in the same decade that Nadia came back under the influence of Malevich, whose touchstone status was reinvigorated when she leaned towards neo-Suprematism, which was not only expressed in painting; Expressed in the form of jewelry, sculptures and mosaics. She double-annotated the paintings from this time based on research from 40 years ago. In the early 1970s, she also made brooches and a large cardigan for Pierre Cardin Plaid decoration Join the craftsmen of the Atelier d’Aubusson.
in Nadia Samovar died of natural causes (1957), a work by legendary Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky presented as a stack of books with a guitar and a decorative tea urn in the center. In his 1914 poem The four-part painting of Clouds in Trousers, “I saw something across the mountains of time/that no one else had seen,” he wrote. His words also apply to his compatriot Nadia Léger, who valued her vision and that of women at large experience, when few people did.
“Nadia Léger: an avant-garde woman” will be on display at the Maillol Museum in Paris until March 23, 2025.
