ABSTRACT
Master Leger was overlooked for a while. The conscious preoccupations of the younger painters in New York during the '40s lay in a different quarter; and so few of his 1910-1913 pictures were known. The sequence of promise, fulfillment and decline his exhibition revealed was much like that in the previous Matisse, Picasso and Braque retrospectives, and its dates site the chronological contour lines of School of Paris painting over the last forty or fifty years. Michel Seuphor refers to 1912 as 'perhaps the most beautiful date in the whole history of painting in France'. That year Cubism reached fullest flower, and Leger was one of the three artists mainly responsible, even though he did not paint with 'cubes'. In 1914 he had, like Braque, to go to war, and the few paintings he finished while in the army are rather weak.
