The New York Times takes a look at
"Léger: Modern Art and the Metropolis," a group show disguised as a single-star vehicle.
The exhibition includes numerous mediums: painting but also film, stage design, posters and several forms of printed matter. Orchestrated around “The City,” Léger’s great clangorous mural-size ode to the metropolis of 1919, it situates his art among that of about 40 of his contemporaries. They include like-minded painters, sculptors, writers, graphic designers, filmmakers and architects who were often friends and with whom he collaborated on all sorts of projects outside of painting.
In the end, only about a third of the 180 items on view are actually by Léger (1881-1955). But even as the show quietly subverts the convention of the monographic exhibition, his work almost never gets lost — it is formally too robust, or as he might have put it, too viscerally plastic. An added benefit throughout is that the show is studded with unfamiliar works, both by him and by others from home and abroad.
Original source: The New York Times
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