Machine Modernism, Masculinity, and the Trauma of War: The Art of Fernand Léger

Investigates the artwork of Fernand Léger, one of machine modernism’s leading figures, as a case study of the aesthetic’s origins in World War I, its unstable production of masculinity, and its collapse in the context of surrealism, economic crises, and the revival of war memories.

Maureen G. Shanahan is Professor of Art History at James Madison University. She has published some twenty articles on gender, trauma, Léger, and other modernist themes. She is coeditor of Simón Bolívar: Travels and Transformations of a Cultural Icon.