Fernand Léger, who was active as painter, graphic artist, mosaic- and glass artist, sculptor, ceramic- and commercial artist, counts among the big names of the French avant-garde.
Fernand Léger began to develop his own characteristic style out of the contact with the art of Paul Cézanne and Cubism as of 1909. His variant of a Synthetic Cubism established a style that consisted of basic geometric shapes such as sphere, cone, cylinder and cubé in pure high-contrast colors. After World War I Fernand Léger turned to monumental neo-classicist style with objects such as crank axles, screws and gearwheels; the human figure is also increasingly "engineered". It was the contact with Surrealism that brought forward curvy and airy works with freely combined motifs in the 1930s and 1940s. In the years after the war Fernand Léger finally worked in a post-cubist, socio-critical Realism.
The Musée national Fernand Léger in Biot commemorates the artist with a permanent exhibition.