Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [208]
Léger had been to the United States for the first time in 1931. By October 1940, when he arrived there as a refugee, he knew his way around. Adaptable by nature, he thoroughly enjoyed himself in New York, and in the country near Lake Champlain, and even at La Guardia Field, where he liked to watch the aircraft come and go. He was polite and constructive in all his comments on America, and he acknowledged that certain of his dreams for society as a whole had been fulfilled there: in the spectacle of New York by night, for example. But he was quick to get back to France, in the winter of 1945, and once there, he set about renewing his lifelong love match with the French working class. He also let it be known that he had joined the French Communist Party.
It would be difficult at the present time to find a more conservative body of men—one more dependent, that is, on the status quo—than the French Communist Party. (This was made particularly clear in May 1968, when it was palpable to all that the last thing the French Communists wanted was to get power.) But in 1945 Léger thought quite sincerely that his adherence to the Party might bring nearer the day when the working classes would have the leisure to develop the new style of life that was theirs for the asking—and, in fact, he remained a Party member for the rest of his life. It had been very disagreeable for Léger to stand up in front of working-class audiences at the time of the Popular Front, in 1936–37, and be greeted with shouts of “You only work for the rich! Who wants to listen to you?” (It was not, however, so traumatic as to cause him to refuse a commission from Nelson Rocke-feller the next year.) Perhaps in a changed France all that could be changed, too?
It never was, really. If he was booed, it was no longer, admittedly, by the working class. I well remember the uproar that broke out in the stalls when Léger appeared in 1949 on the stage of the Opéra in Paris at the first performance of Milhaud’s Bolivar, for which he had designed the scenery. Aesthetic prejudice no doubt played a part in this, but the basic sound was that of the propertied classes baying for the Party member’s blood. The big commissions, however, still came from traditional sources: the Roman Catholic Church, above all. (“Nobody else asked me,” he would say, when taxed with escapism, “and I did so want to make big decorations.”) When he made paintings on the scale of epics, it was for himself primarily; and in his seventies he completed two huge complementary paintings on working-class themes—The Constructors in 1950 and The Great Parade in 1954.
These paintings do honor to Léger as a man: for his energy, his ambition, his largeness of heart. Léger had loved the circus all his life, and he tried to sum up his feelings for it in The Great Parade; The Constructors is a last salute to the children and grandchildren of the men with whom he had served in World War I. But there is a great difference between a painting that corresponds to an urgent social need—to something that has to be said—and one that does not. The two late paintings relate to a France that had already passed into history. They are descriptive, and by implication sentimental, in a way that Léger would never have permitted himself thirty years earlier. The style aspires to grandeur, but without the radical invention that marked the Three Women of 1921. “I’m a painter,” Léger once said. “I’m not in the description business.”
If in these two late paintings he ended up in “the description business,” it was because that particular simplistic view of