Fallen into oblivion, Nadia Léger returns to the spotlight at the Maillol museum in Paris

Communist, resistance fighter, workshop leader, wife of, museum builder in homage to her late husband… the many facets of the committed life of Nadia Léger (1904-1982), the wife of Fernand Léger (1881-1955 ), 20 years his senior, had erased from memories his work as a painter, which had long been forgotten. The publication of an imposing 600-page monograph by Aymar du Châtenet in 2019 will serve as a trigger for the project of a major exhibition (“Nadia Léger. Une femme d’avant-garde”, from November 8, 2024 to March 23 2025 at the Maillol museum in Paris) which finally pays homage to the artist.

The first Cubo-Futurist works

Organized in the rooms of the Maillol museum, repainted in bright colors to highlight the different themes, the exhibition follows the trajectory of Nadia Léger, who left her family and her small village in Belarus at the age of 13 to study at the Beaux workshops. -Arts of Smolensk. From there, she went to Warsaw in Poland where she married a young artist, Stanislas Grabowski, with whom she had a daughter, Wanda, her only child. Her first Cubo-Futurist works testify very early to her knowledge of the avant-garde and, fascinated by the work of Fernand Léger, Nadia set her sights on Paris where she arrived in 1925.

The influence of the master and abstract trends

She began by taking classes with Amédée Ozenfant (1886-1966) at the Académie Moderne, which corresponded to her purist period. In 1928 she joined the classes of Fernand Léger with whom, separated from her first husband, she quickly began an affair. The influence of the master is immediately apparent in his painting and his chromatic range. *

Without ever abandoning figuration, Nadia moved closer to abstract trends and exhibited in 1930 with Cercle et Carré at gallery 23. 1932 was an important date when Nadia joined the Communist Party which she would never leave and went from the status of student to that of an assistant in Léger’s workshop.

Hartung and De Staël for students

Presented in a large room along the exhibition route, the workshop welcomes many students who will become recognized artists, from Hans Hartung to Nicolas de Staël, Aurélie Nemours and Sam Francis. During the Occupation and Léger’s exile in the United States, Nadia valiantly continued to run the workshop relocated to Montrouge, while joining the Resistance. In 1948, she obtained the much-desired Soviet nationality, divorced in 1952 from her first husband and married Fernand Léger the same year.

A work unfairly obscured

After his death two years later, Nadia devoted her energy to promoting his work, the inauguration of the Fernand Léger museum in Biot, in the Alpes-Maritimes, in 1960 testifying to her involvement and generosity. In 1957, she married for the third time the artist Georges Bauquier and continued to produce works that were suddenly resolutely neo-suprematist, definitively abandoning figuration.

Organized with the precious collaboration of the artist’s descendants, the exhibition puts the entire development of a work unjustly overlooked in the spotlight. Richly, she also presents it in relation to her masters and her contemporaries, intelligently situating the work in its context and in dialogue with those that Nadia encounters on a daily basis. A largely justified rehabilitation.

“Nadia Léger, an avant-garde woman”
Maillol Museum, 59-61 rue de Grenelle, 75007, Paris
Until March 23