Saturday, November 20 at 11 a.m. The book “Roland Brice, Sculptor of the Grand Fire and Friend of Fernand Léger” will be presented and available at the Museum’s bookstore as the sole literary reference throughout the duration of the exhibition, which will run until May.
The word from Ariane Coulondre, director of the Museum and curator of the exhibition:
“It is towards the end of his life that Fernand Léger becomes interested in ceramics,
as a place for experimentation and renewal of his pictorial work.
The artist sees it as a way to move away from the easel painting frame and
to open painting to new dimensions: relief
and monumentality.
Approaching ceramics with a painter’s eye, Léger plays on
volume to energize his compositions and animate his famous
black outline. In line with his ideal of art for all, the polychrome sculpture
allows him to unfold his work in monumental projects
designed for public spaces. In 1954, he develops
the model for a children’s garden:
I have the idea of a high, massively colorful sculpture, with
shapes like flames, where the sea breeze could play.
It would be placed by the seaside, children could pass through it, run
through it, or secretly spit on it… Not a monument you
look at, but a useful and spectacular object in life, and especially not
a guard around it!
Ceramics also hold a special place in the history
of the museum because it is the very reason for the artist’s arrival on
the Côte d’Azur. Indeed, from 1950
onwards, Fernand Léger develops a fruitful collaboration with one of his former students, Roland
Brice, and his son Claude, both ceramicists settled in Biot.
It is at the foot of this village that the master acquires just before
his death a house and a piece of land on which he intends to build
large-scale works. On this site, in
1960, the Fernand Léger Museum will be born in the park of which
the monumental ceramic of the Children’s Garden, in the spirit of the master of the place, will be posthumously created.
