MARIA DUARTE picks the best and worst of a crowded year of films
A purpose to pleasure
Tate Liverpool's exhibition reveals the brilliance of Fernand Leger, one of the great painters of realist political art, says CHRISTINE LINDEY
ABC by Fernand Leeger, 1927
JOSEPHINE BARBARO welcomes a diverse anthology of experiences by autistic women that amounts to a resounding chorus, demanding to be heard
PAUL BUHLE recommends an eminently useful book that examines the political opportunities for popular anti-fascist intervention
PETER MASON is entertained by the autobiography of Charlie Harper, one of punk’s most enduring figures
JAMIE BRITTON reaches for the sick bucket as he is forced to engorge detail after detail of the Royal Family’s wealth
STEVE JOHNSON picks his favourites from the many memorable albums of the year, and one stunning new festival
FERNAND LEGER (1881-1955) grasped life with insatiable optimism and a passion for ideas. He was born in Normandy to a belligerent cattle merchant who died during his early childhood, leaving an impoverished widow. She apprenticed the 16-year-old Leger to an architect, but, in 1900, he fulfilled his desire to study art in Paris, by supporting himself as an architectural draughtsman.
He had grasped the full significance of the recent revolutionary Cubist and Futurist innovations and used them to convey the modernity of urban life, with its simultaneous cacophony of sounds, speeding motorised vehicles and visual stimulation.
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Ben Cowles speaks with IAN ‘TREE’ ROBINSON and ANDY DAVIES, two of the string pullers behind the Manchester Punk Festival, ahead of its 10th year show later this month
JAN WOOLF wallows in the historical mulch of post WW2 West Germany, and the resistant, challenging sense made of it by Anselm Kiefer
CAROLINE FOWLER explains how the slave trade helped establish the ‘golden age’ of Dutch painting and where to find its hidden traces
The Morning Star sorts the good eggs from the rotten scoundrels of the year