Fernand Léger, born on 4 February 1881 in Argentan (Orne) and died on 17 August 1955 in Gif-sur-Yvette (Essonne), worked in a multitude of media, including painting, ceramics, engraving, large-scale frescoes, films, theatre, dance, glass and publishing.

Known for his major contributions to the modern avant-garde movement: cubism. Alongside Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, Léger created new ways to express three-dimensional space on the flat surface of a canvas.

At the Salon des Indépendants in 1911, Léger exhibited paintings that established him as a major Cubist painter. In cubism, he was interested in colours, shapes and volumes.

He put his artistic career on hold when he was recruited by the army in 1914. He returned with a head injury and was gassed at Verdun in 1916. This experience strengthened Léger's interest in social problems and justice; the themes of his paintings were then imbued with a more social resonance.

Léger founded the Académie de l'Art Moderne in his studio in 1924 with the French cubist painter Amédée Ozenfant. The Academy existed until 1939, during which time he developed Tubism, a style in which the human body and architectural elements are represented in three-dimensional forms to resemble large cylinders and tubes.

In 1924, he completed his first film Ballet Mécanique. Léger moved to New York to escape World War II and gave a series of lectures at Yale University attended by many artists, also influencing the painters of the New York School.

Léger returned to France in 1946 and became intensely involved with the Communist Party. In the 1950s, his paintings demonstrate his interest in the ordinary man. In order to make his work widely known, he temporarily installed several of his paintings from the series Les Constructeurs in the canteen of the Renault factory near Paris, to mixed reactions. He continued to travel and to produce works in different media until his death in 1955.