I’d like to start rolling out some fea­tures on Brown Paper Bag now that the site is rapidly approach­ing its two month birth­day. I’ve always enjoyed look­ing at both con­tem­po­rary and older works of art. After all, you have to under­stand where the rules came from to effec­tively break them! It’s also help­ful in pre­dict­ing where things are going and inform­ing your own work.

So… with­out fur­ther ado… I intro­duce to you Time Travel Tues­day (I can’t help that I watch too many ter­ri­ble space-related films)! To kick it off, I’ll be fea­tur­ing the work of Ferd­nand Leger, a French painter that was mak­ing work in the early to mid half of the 20th cen­tury (1902 — 1955).

Orig­i­nally study­ing as an archi­tect, Ferd­nand began seri­ously paint­ing at the age of 25. As an artist, he was influ­enced by a num­ber of dif­fer­ent artis­tic move­ments and artists, includ­ing cubism, purism, and futur­ism. Start­ing in 1927, he grad­u­ally moved from doing work inspired by archi­tec­ture was plac­ing greater impor­tance on organic forms. His work at this time was still fairly abstract, until 1945. It was then he joined the Com­mu­nist Party and his images became more mon­u­men­tal fig­ures, and it was his deter­mi­na­tion to depict the com­mon man. Ferd­nand can be iden­ti­fied as not nec­es­sar­ily a fierce Marx­ist, but pas­sion­ate Humanist.

When I first saw his work, I viewed Ferdnand’s later pieces — scenes of pop­u­lar life fea­tur­ing acro­bats, builders, divers, and coun­try out­ings. This work still res­onates with me — I love the mix­ture of abstrac­tion and his weighty lines and sharp shapes. It’s also very inter­est­ing to see where he’s come from, because although he uses a more illus­tra­tive touch to his later work, it still holds cubist ten­den­cies and offers unique perspective.

Images via the Fine Arts Museum San Fran­cisco, Guggen­heim Museum, and MoMA.