Niki de Saint Phalle, "Nana santé". Photo © 2024 Niki Charitable Art Foundation
Musée du Luxembourg marketing describes Tous Léger ! Avec Niki de Saint Phalle, Yves Klein, Martial Raysse, Keith Haring... as “highlighting the major artists of Nouveau Réalisme (“New Realism”) and the dialogue with the American scene”.
Marketing. Tous Léger! is more and better than that, with a concept and narrative that suggests to even an inattentive visitor a way of understanding how the visual arts gets from the warm and fuzzy Impressionism of Claude Monet to the puzzling good “bad art” of Keith Haring.
Fernand Léger, “Nature Morte, A.B.C.”. Photo © Grand Palais RMN
Tous Léger focuses on the very varied production of a bit more than 20 known and less known artists born after 1920 and working in Europe and the USA from 1945 and on into the 2000s. With the exception of Haring, born in 1958 and active only from the 1980s until his early death, featured artists such as Christo & Jeanne Claude, Arman, Daniel Spoerri, Niki de Saint Phalle, Robert Indiana, Raymond Hains, Yves Klein and Roy Lichtenstein, were most visible – not to say active or influential – in the 1960s and 1970s.
I used the range of paronomasia in Tous Léger – sorry, “punning” just doesn’t do the trick here – as my structuring lens. Think “Tous Charlie!” (“Everybody [is] Charlie!”). The slogan means to express solidarity and sympathy for the victims of the 2015 terror attack on the offices of the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo. But like most slogans, it has a lot of complex rattles and tinkles, some intended, some unintended some a result of mysterious synchronicity.
Yves Klein, “Vénus bleue (Vénus d’Alexandrie)”. Photo ©JeanchristopheLett
Beyond personal memories such as veteran ’68ers calling reluctant thanks to the riot police as they marched, “Tous Charlie” may, for example, in some ears, suggest support of democratic values or have echoes of historical anti-clericalism. Or some may see a link between the fact that “Charlie” is the feminine of “Charles”, not the nickname, and the misogynist Islamist attackers’ choice of the magazine as a target. Or…
The first thing Tous Léger conjures up for me is something jokey such as “Everybody’s Giddy” or, applied to the 1950s or 1960s or 1970s, especially, “Wild Child”. “Léger” means of course “lighthearted”, “not heavy”, “giddy”, “carefree”, “immoral”, “irresponsible” and “foolish”: carefree and/but/or alarming.
Fernand Léger, “Les Quatre cyclists”. Photo © GrandPalaisRmn
But of course Tous Léger is an art show for serious and un-alarming people, so Léger actually points to: “Everybody [has a part of the esthetic heritage of] Fernand Léger [though trained as an architect, became a well-known early 20th-century post-Impressionist, Cézannist, Cubist painter, soldier, fascinated by film and the close-up, enthroned at MOMA in 1935, Yale professor, art teacher and philosopher of art, Vichy exile, communist, born 1881, died 1955, in France]”.
But to get back to my first feeling, “léger” as “lighthearted”, “not heavy”, “giddy”, “carefree”, “immoral”, “foolish” and “irresponsible” in a lot of ways does sum up the art scene in the 1950s - 1960s - 1970s, especially, public and critical reaction to junk cars run through a metal compactor and presented as sculpture (1961, César Baldaccini), blank walls as paintings (1958, Yves Klein), kiddy-toys treacherously inserted in plaster and representing notions of the unconscious (1959-60, Niki de Saint Phalle) or action-concepts such as signing public property (1963, Ben Vautier, “Fluxus Côte d’Azur”) or using a rifle as a paint brush (1961, Niki de Saint Phalle).
BEN, “Si l’art est partout, il est aussi dans cette boîte”. Photo © Ben Vautier
Indeed, many, maybe most, of the artists and works on display for Tous Léger are more known to the public for the process of creating their different works or re- or de-contextualizing an ordinary thing than for the “product” of either.
Also, the paronomasiac gamut of “lighthearted-to-irresponsible” could pretty well be a proud self-description of a “moral generation” (+/-60 years) whose early experience of art included Dadaism and whose later cohort is supposed to have chanted “Sous-les pavés, la plage!”, whose dangerous “Danny the Red” (Daniel Cohn-Bendit) was so called both because of his supposed revolutionary politics and his fiery red hair.
Raymond Hains, “SEITA”. Photo © Ville de Nice
Cohn-Bendit’s political career began with a remark that a 300-page official government report on youth made not a single mention of sex.
In short, the artists of Tous Léger, including Léger himself, who joined the communist party in 1945, were people trying to put distance between themselves and, to navigate a path through, culture represented as much by the city fathers of Argentan, Orne, Normandy, the cynical Nazi collaborator Maurice Papon, the archbishop of Paris, and the not-quite fabulist André Malraux as by themselves, John Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and post-Impressionist painters and sculptors such as Fernand Léger.
Fernand Léger, “Visage à la main sur fond rouge”. Photo © GrandPalaisRmn - Gérard Blot © Adagp, Paris, 2025
What I come away from Tous Léger thinking is that Fernand Léger is, more than anything else, a vector for an evolving idea of how the individual person, his or her experience and vision, fit together when it comes to art.
When all is said and done, Léger shares with the Tous of Yves Kleins or Niki de Saint Phalles or Ben Vautiers a search for a nouveau réalisme (“new realism”) – not the technical orientations of a “school of painting” but, essentially, a longing for a new, much more lighthearted, even irresponsible and giddy way of looking at the world around.
This is a very broad and discussable statement, but I think that Léger is a pattern of the link between his generation – those who believed in the thing of art – and the generation represented in the exhibition – those who believe in creativity.
Keith Haring, “Untitled (n° 2557)”. Photo © Keith Haring Foundation, 2025
So, my post-Tous Léger feeling is that, although he does share broad ideas, Léger does not share with the de Saint Phalles, Kleins, Raysses, Harings, Christos, Armans, Bens, et al., of the exhibition any of the new forms of art and tools and processes for creating art that the latter come up with to practice an art that has become, essentially, a product of individual creativity.
Indeed, with a table called Histoire des Gestes, the curators of Tous Léger have to invent a whole new (at least to me) system of weighing, measuring and considering their work according to the semantic potentialities and critical contexts or narratives of the products of the creativity involved – Assemble! Burn! Accumulate! Wrap! Klein Bleu is about perception not color!
Gilbert & George, “Flower Worship”. Photo © Ville de Nice - Muriel Anssens © Gilbert & George, 2025
So, hey, presto! I come away from Tous Léger thinking that getting from Impressionism to the intriguing “bad art” creativity of Keith Haring is about the individual person, the nature of the world around and his or her experience of it – or even shaping a new world – is what “art” has been all about these past 100 years and more.
Ferdinand Léger and others of his generation held a portal open, but it is thanks to the deeds of the generation of these 20 or so artists of Tous Léger that nowadays we don’t talk so much about “art “things as about “creation”. As Keith Haring put it in his journal in 1979, " … The importance of movement is intensified when a painting becomes a performance. The performance (the act of painting) becomes as important as the resulting painting".
Fernand Léger, “Le Tournesol”. Photo © GrandPalaisRmn
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I visited “Tous Légers” on 19 March 2025. The exhibition is curated by Anne Dopffer,
Directrice des musées nationaux du XXe siècle des Alpes-Maritimes in collaboration with Julie Guttierez,
Conservatrice en chef du patrimoine Musée national Fernand Léger, Biot, France and Rébecca François, attachée de conservation du patrimoine
Musée d’Art Moderne et d’Art Contemporain de Nice (MAMAC), and runs until 20 July 2025 at Musée du Luxembourg, Paris. Exhibition design by Véronique Dollfus, with graphics by Claire Boitel of Atelier JBL and lighting by Philippe Collet of Abraxas Concepts
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List of Artists, “Tous Léger! Avec Niki de Saint Phalle, Yves Klein, Martial Raysse, Keith Haring...”
Marcel Alocco, 1937, Nice – lives and works in Nice/ Karel Appel, 1921, Amsterdam – 2006, Zurich/ ARMAN (Armand Fernandez), 1928, Nice – 2005, New York/ BEN (Benjamin Vautier), 1935, Naples – 2024, Nice/ César (César Baldaccini), 1921, Marseilles – 1998, Paris/ Christo & Jeanne Claude: Christo Javacheff, 1935, Gabrovo (Bulgaria) – 2020, New York/Jeanne-Claude, 1935, Casablanca – 2009, New York/ Gilbert & George: Gilbert, 1943, San Martino (Italy)/George, 1942, Plymouth (England) – both live and work in London/ Raymond Hains, 1926, Saint-Brieuc (France) - 2005, Paris/ Keith Haring, 1958, Kunztown, PA (USA) – 1990, New York/ Robert Indiana, 1928, New Castle (USA) – 2018, Vinalhaven, ME (USA)/ Alain Jacquet , 1939, Neuilly-sur-Seine (France) – 2008, New York/ Yves Klein, 1928, Nice – 1962, Paris/ Fernand Léger, 1881, Argentan (France) – 1955, Gif-sur-Yvette (France)/ Roy Lichtenstein, 1923, New York – 1997, New York/ Martial Raysse , 1936, Golfe-Juan (France) – lives and works in Issigeac (France)/ Larry Rivers , 1923, New York – 2002, Southampton (USA)/ Niki de Saint Phalle , 1930, Neuilly-sur-Seine (France) – 2002, San Diego/ Daniel Spoerri , 1930, Galati (Kingdom of Romania) – 2024, Vienna/ Jacques Villeglé (Jacques Mahé de La Villeglé), 1926, Quimper (France) – 2022, Paris/ May Wilson, 1905, Baltimore – 1986, New York