AN EXACT contemporary of Picasso, Fernand Leger was born in 1881 in the Normandy market town of Argentan to an argumentative cattle merchant and a gentle mother.

He lost his father when he was very young and his widowed parent gradually lost most of their possessions. Although Leger’s heart was in painting, she apprenticed him to an architect when he turned 16, believing this to be a more respectable profession. This training in precise draughtsmanship served him well and shines through his mature works.

At the age of 19, Leger went to Paris to study art by financing himself with hack draughtsman’s work. When he discovered the avant-garde, he was especially thrilled by Cezanne for rejecting academic mimicry of the visible world as a static entity.

By shattering his motifs and rebuilding them into small, interacting planes Cezanne succeeded in creating paintings which equate the active, ever shifting act of seeing,

Leger developed this new sensibility by adding the staccato, repetitive outlines of Italian Futurism to suggest movement. The Wedding of 1910-11 echoes the complex, fragmentary assault on the senses of fast city life, with its simultaneous sights and sounds, by depicting fragments of the jostling crowd glimpsed between clouds of smoke.

But he said that he truly woke up “both as a man and as an artist” while soldiering alongside working-class men in the trenches of WWI: “...my new comrades were miners, labourers, artisans who worked in wood or metal... Around me were men of such humour, such richness — I am speaking of the mobile, coloured language of slang... they were poets, inventors of everyday poetic imagery.”

After WWI, Leger’s paintings became more direct. The compositions confront the viewer frontally, with figures and objects sharply defined and co-existing with flat, abstract geometric shapes in bright colours which echo those of street advertisements.

Yet modernity remained the theme. In The City (1919), two small figures descend a street staircase, perhaps into a metro station, surrounded by rigid lamp posts, posters, criss-crossed iron girders, fragments of stencilled street signage and abstract forms. Still suggesting the cacophony of urban life, the paintings were Modernist yet more orderly and precise than his pre-war ones.

Trench life had sown the seeds of Leger’s socialism but it fully blossomed during the 1930s Popular Front years. Engaged in the realism versus abstraction debates, he fully committed to creating an accessible, easily legible art of its times.

Progressives then viewed the “machine age” as a liberator of humankind. It would banish the drudgery of intensive and relentless manual labour and cheap mass-produced goods would raise material standards for all. Hence Leger’s celebration of machine parts and of the anonymity of mass manufactured objects.

But his politicisation also brought a greater focus on human beings and working-class culture into his work. The Three Musicians of 1930 celebrates popular dance hall musicians, while other works allude to circus performers.

In 1945 Leger joined the French Communist Party. In what turned out to be the last decade of his life, he produced some of his greatest paintings, with The Homage to Louis David of 1948-9 a masterful celebration of the integrity and social importance of the working class.

The title’s reference to the painter of the French revolution suggests that only the people can claim their right to pleasure, leisure and peace. A family faces us on that quintessential proletarian day out — a visit to the countryside, overlooked by fluttering doves of peace.

As if posing for a family photograph, their smiles hover but do not break into inane grins. They return our gaze with gentle self-assurance and if it is a cliche that disaster and sorrow are far easier to portray than pleasure and joy, which tend to be anodyne, Leger defied this.

In 1950 his Constructor series twinned the themes of the city and workers. The paintings assert the collaboration and camaraderie on which building workers depend in their dangerous work as they negotiate scaffolding and girders high in the sky.

A dynamic and organised person, Leger also produced public murals, stage designs and collaborated with Man Ray on the wonderful film Ballet Mechanic of 1924 which sums up a love of everyday life and modernity. He also founded his own radical art school in Paris where he inspired generations of international students.

Some people find Leger’s work difficult to warm to, due to his avoidance of expressing emotion which was spurred by his hatred of sentimental academic art.

Yet his celebration of the modernity of the machine age and his commitment to a legible, accessible art led him to produce works which belong firmly in the French classical tradition.

Like the revolutionary Louis David whom he admired, Leger’s paintings are calm, balanced and of their time without becoming dated.