Young and tender...nude and lovely!

We met Fernand Leger (1881-1955 ) more than 3 times this summer, the 1st time at Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, the 2nd time at Modern Art Museum, Centre Pompidou; and the 3rd time last week at Fondation Beyeller, Basel.

Pas du tout "leger" (not at all light), Monsieur Leger! With all that volumne and precision in the paintings....except, ah oui! except the colors, those brightly colored forms and lines apparently do have the effect of rendering things much lighter than they really weighed.

Before writing more about his paintings in Chinese - see the reason why i can't do it now? - I feel like trying to get more travellers to walk into any modern art museum where you can encounter Leger's works, and get to know this guy.

For one thing at least we should admire this guy today - the 40th anniversary of the invasion of Prague by the Red Army - for Fernand Leger had witnessed the cruelty of the 1st war and almost got killed himself in that "modern war" but still kept his faith in the positiveness of our being in the "modern" society.

Don't see the relation? i meant many other artists got out of the war (and many more didn't) and went nuts or..... "Dadaists", "Expressionists" and "Fauvists"....but he didn't. He continued to paint the "brightness" of his modern society - with machine-gun-precision.

Milan Kundera didn't keep that faith in our being "modern" after the invasion of the Red Army and he "painted" Prague in his famous novel "The unbearable lightness of Life". Very "leger (french word for "light") in tone....but pretty "sombre" in colors though!