Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [205]
JOHN RUSSELL was art critic for the Sunday Times of London and chief art critic for the New York Times from 1982 to 1990. He was also the author of Paris (Harry N. Abrams, 1983, 1994), Reading Russell: Essays 1941–1988 on Ideas, Literature, Art, Theater, Music, Places, and Persons (Harry N. Abrams, 1989), a number of monographs on artists such as Georges Seurat, Francis Bacon, Henry Moore, and Max Ernst, as well as The Meanings of Modern Art (Icon, 1991, revised edition), among others. Russell was renowned for avoiding the scathing form of art criticism and preferred to simply share his enthusiasm with his readers. As he wrote in Reading Russell, “It has never seemed to me much of an ambition to go through life snarling and spewing.” His obituary in the New York Times in 2008 noted that art, for Russell, “remained a glorious love affair and a lifelong adventure. ‘When art is made new, we are made new with it,’ he wrote in the first volume of The Meanings of Modern Art. ‘We have a sense of solidarity with our own time, and of psychic energies shared and redoubled, which is just about the most satisfying thing that life has to offer.’ ”
EVERY SO OFTEN there surfaces in art an image that is so compelling, so absolutely true to one particular moment in history, that it puts the historians out of business. One such image is evoked by The Mechanic, Fernand Léger’s painting of 1920 that fixes once and for all the idea that the life of the industrialized masses need not be without dignity, nor the individual mass- man turned into a disinherited cipher.
Léger believed this, with all his heart. If he makes us believe it, too, it is because he was not only a master of plain statement but a man to whom doubt and compromise and equivocation were abhorrent. He believed that the conveyor belt and the assembly line had changed life for the better, and that the industrialized working man would have his full share of the benefits of his hard work. It was a matter of faith with him that the mechanic was the New Man, the man for whom the machine was not a tyrant but the instrument of social liberation.
This could have led to a sententious, Stalin-type imagery of the Heroic Worker. But Léger’s mechanic is not at all like that, despite his bulging muscles. He is a man with a mind of his own. No faceless abstraction, he is distinctively a Frenchman of the 1920s, with his nautical tattoo, his sleeked-down hair and heavy mustache, his cigarette at the ready and rings on his well-fleshed finger. But there is also something very grand and quite timeless about him. Léger in 1919 had been in and out of the newly reopened Egyptian and Assyrian rooms in the Louvre, and he gave his mechanic a look of ancient art in the severe frontal pose of the torso and the right-angled turn of the head on the neck. The mechanic meets us both head-on and in profile, as he might in an Assyrian relief.
Behind him, in terms of geometric flat planes and brilliant color, is the ideal place of work: the factory that never was. Looking at the casquelike cut of his forehead and cheekbones, we see immediately that this man is at one with his machines and could wish for no greater fulfillment than to be in charge of them.
Léger himself was not of industrial origins, and he never in his