Move Over, Fernand Léger: In Paris, Nadia Khodossievitch-Léger Gets Her Due

Does the name Nadia Khodossievitch-Léger ring a bell? She has a Wikipedia page, but her second husband, the French artist Fernand Léger, has a much longer one. Wikipedia may not be a reliable barometer for veritable cultural importance, but it reflects the fact that the artist couple has never been allotted the same cultural import, on or off the Internet. Nadia was not only instrumental to Fernand Léger’s teaching and legacy and his inspiration but also a creative generator of her own, often boldly spotlighting herself as well as other politically involved women of her era. Why should Fernand erase, or even becloud, Nadia?

“Nadia Léger: An Avant-Garde Woman” showcases over 150 works at Musée Maillol in Paris and serves as a form of reparations to yet another overlooked female artist. Nadia Léger’s work isn’t necessarily timeless—if anything, it’s very anchored in its era and tinged with Communist fervor—but it reaches beyond patriarchal norms to center female activists and intellectuals, including herself.

The exhibition text notes that Nadia “virtually disappeared from the collective memory” and then offers suppositions for that omission, including the obvious pervasiveness of sexism but also the lack of “coherence” in her style (veering between Suprematism, Constructivism and Cubism, which of course would never be dismissed if she was a man). Whether her Stalinist-inflected Communism might have acted as an impediment is also suggested, though not elaborated on, in the exhibition. The fact that many French and foreign intellectuals at the time were drawn to Communism and the party’s belief in working-class left-wing values striving for human progress doesn’t implicate Nadia specifically, though many left the party eventually in the latter half of the 20th Century as Stalin’s atrocious criminal effect became harder to deny. Nadia remained in the party.

The most likely reason she is little known is that her famous husband outshined her, art-historically speaking. A museum in his name—the Musée National Fernand Léger—was inaugurated in 1960 in the south of France, becoming a national institution in 1969. In a blown-up photograph in the stairwell, Nadia stands beaming in a fur coat and head-wrapped scarf at the ceremony with prominent Minister of Cultural Affairs André Malraux—she was, in fact, essential to facilitating her husband’s patrimonial presence.

Born in Russia (in what is now Belarus), Nadia (1904-1982) studied under Kazimir Malevich before moving to Poland. One of her earliest works on view is Jeune Fille Suprématiste (circa 1921-22), featuring a girl in profile seated against geometric blue and red forms, highlighting her interest in the female subject and in abstract compositions.

When she arrived in Paris in 1925, she folded in with the Montparnasse artists (she later painted portraits of Chagall and Picasso). She sold her first painting—the experimentally abstracted oil on canvas, Nu—to prominent collector Marie-Laure de Noailles. Having initially encountered Fernand Léger’s work in issue four of the magazine L’Esprit Nouveau: Revue Internationale d’Esthétique (a short-lived publication launched in 1920 by Le Corbusier), she became his pupil in 1928 at his Académie Moderne, then his assistant by 1932, and then his wife by 1952. The school lasted between 1924 and 1955 (excepting the war years from 1939 to 1945, when Fernand Léger was in New York), and the exhibition displays black-and-white archival images of the bustling studio taken by French photographer Robert Doisneau, in which both men and women don paint-streaked smocks and lean over their drawing pads as they examine nude models.

By 1937, the styles of Nadia and Fernand Léger became porously entwined—both characterized by biomorphic forms—and they modeled for one another: his Untitled [Nadia] from 1953, in gouache and India ink, shows her with her left hand pressed up against her cheek, flat blocks of color adrift over her face, shoulder and wrists; her oil on canvas Portrait de Fernand Léger, from 1940, shows him solemn and suited before an amorphous black form that looks like a knotted ginger root.

Works by Fernand Léger are shown in the exhibition—his Adam et Ève (1934) of the Biblical figures against a white background with contoured shapes to their left and Le Vase Rouge (1948-1950) of a woman clutching a vessel—and the two styles are clearly inextricable. Nadia did a self-portrait in 1948 that functioned as a direct response to Fernand’s 1935 portrait of American collector Maud Dale—both women clasp their hands across their chests over their hearts, their arms bare in green dresses with white embellishment as they stand before red drapery. In Fernand’s work, the sitter wanly looks out the corner of the frame; in Nadia’s self-portrait, she unflinchingly grabs the viewer’s gaze with sly assurance.

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Nadia was a member of the French Resistance and depicted other brave female activists like Danielle Casanova (deported to and killed in Auschwitz) and Betty Albrecht (tortured in Fresnes prison and died by suicide). After the war, her Communist ideology sprung forth in her work, and her Soviet allegiances made themselves known—she painted Lenin and his wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, multiple times, as well as Marx and Stalin, via gouache collages and lithography on paper. In the ‘60s, she devoted work (and opened her home) to cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, who was the first man to orbit the earth in the Vostok 1 mission in 1961; in an abstracted cosmic painting in 1963, she depicts his face floating on a black background alongside an orange sphere and gray rectangles.

This was the same decade in which Nadia was drawn back into Malevich’s influence, his touchstone status reinvigorated as she leaned into a Neo-Suprematism that expressed itself not just in paintings but also in the form of jewelry, sculpture and mosaics. She double-dated her paintings from this time based on studies she’d made 40 years prior. In the early ‘70s, she also created brooches for Pierre Cardin and a large wool tapisserie with the artisans at Atelier d’Aubusson.

In Nadia’s Nature Morte au Samovar (1957), the work of legendary Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky is represented in a stack of books placed amongst a guitar and a decorative tea urn. In his 1914 poem A Cloud in Pants A Tetraptych, he writes: “I see something crossing the mountains of time / which no one sees.” His words could be applied to his compatriot Nadia Léger, who valorized her own vision and the experiences of women at large when few were doing so.

“Nadia Léger: An Avant-Garde Woman” is at Musée Maillol in Paris through March 23, 2025.