Original Fernand Leger Poster Art Et Solidarite 1957 - Mourlot

This is an original lithographic poster printed by Mourlot Frères in 1957 for Art et Solidarité — a charitable sale and exhibition held at the Galerie Marcel C. Coard in Paris, in which leading contemporary artists donated works to fund free summer holidays for impoverished city children. The image is taken from Fernand Léger's celebrated painting La Mère et l'Enfant — one of his most tender and humanist compositions, and a perfect embodiment of the spirit of the event. Two years after Léger's death, his art was being put directly in service of the social solidarity he had championed throughout his life.

Fernand Léger (1881–1955), born in Argentan in Normandy, was one of the defining figures of 20th-century art — a painter of extraordinary range and conviction whose work moved from early Cubism through a celebration of the machine age to the great humanist canvases of his final decades. He was among the first artists to find beauty in the forms of modern industry — pipes, girders, cylinders, the geometry of the factory and the street — and among the last to insist that this beauty belonged to everyone, not merely to the cultivated few. His years in the United States during the Second World War deepened his commitment to an art of solidarity: he returned to France in 1946 convinced that painting must speak to working people, and his late work — the circus performers, the construction workers, the cyclists and divers — reflects that conviction with joyful, primary-coloured directness.

La Mère et l'Enfant distils that humanism into its most essential form: bold outlines, flat planes of red, green and yellow, the universal subject of mother and child rendered with the graphic confidence of an artist who had made the monumental feel immediate. Printed by Mourlot Frères with the chromatic fidelity that only they could deliver, this poster is both a work of art and a document of a specific act of generosity — Léger's image, after his death, still working in the world he believed art should serve.

The poster has been freshly linen backed — the gold standard of vintage poster conservation — ensuring the piece is stable, flat, and ready for framing.

A deeply humanist piece — Léger's most universal image, in service of the solidarity he spent his life defending.