Forging men and manufacturing women: Fernand Leger's mechanical arts.

Abstract

This dissertation examines Fernand Leger's wartime and postwar painting and his postwar set design as an index of changing attitudes about gender in French culture between 1917 and 1924. In Chapter One, it argues that the machine aesthetic that Fernand Leger developed during World War I with his <italic>Card Party</italic> (1917) painting and afterwards with his mechanical man images was not an unqualified embrace of war as a maker of men. Instead, Leger's figures embody the historical trauma that undermined the dominant ideology of masculine mastery, especially for the laboring classes. In Chapter Two, it is shown that Leger's Cubist representations of working class men reclaim the symbolic order of labor for the male worker at the same time that they invoke the postwar economic traumas that he thought were as destructive to masculinity as war: the poor French economy, the unstable currency prior to the Dawes Plan, and Leger's own monetary losses due to the reparations' sales of the Daniel-Henri Kahnweiler and Wilhelm Uhde collections. Chapters Three and Four examine Leger's contributions to collaborative works in light of his theory of the spectacle that he developed in several essays about ballet and film. In these essays, he describes the subject position of an artist-engineer who envisions utopian uses to technologies and imagines new social orders. His designs for the Swedish Ballet's <italic>Creation of the World</italic> (1923) represent hybrid beings in a world that combines African and industrial iconography and invokes multiple social and sexual movements: Taylorist factory production, modernist dance, migration and immigration to Paris, Le Corbusier's theories of the new urbanism promoted in <italic>L'Esprit Nouveau</italic>, and the different meanings attached to <italic>negre</italic> and to the dancing new woman. Leger's laboratory set for <italic>The Inhuman Woman</italic> (1924) is an object-spectacle that replaces the human star. It synthesizes ideas of invention identified with new communication systems (telegraph, radio, television, film) and with new social orders offered by Constructivist models. In both cases, it is argued that the new worlds of Leger's spectacles are also fantasies of social control positioned at the nexus of post-war ideologies about natalism, colonialism, immigration and nationalism.