Fernand Léger (* 4 February 1881 in Argentan in Normandy; † 17 August 1955 in Gif-sur-Yvette near Paris) was a French painter, sculptor, graphic artist, ceramicist and film director. His early work is classified as Cubism. In his works after the Second World War, his painterly style changed. From the 1920s onwards, he increasingly integrated figurative elements into his paintings. Léger's late work had an influence on the American painters of Pop Art, such as Roy Lichtenstein.
In the years from 1914 to 1916, Léger experienced the horrors of war in the trenches.
This experience changed him, and subsequently he turned increasingly to the world of the immediately visible, the living space of modern man and the objects that surround him. The predominant theme became the big city with its architecture, its advertising spaces and its signs.