WILL STONE fact-checks the colourful life of Ozzy Osbourne
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
JAMES CROSSLEY applauds a lucid biography of the German radical preacher who reemerged as a hero in the GDR
Prizes all round: the Bard hands plaudits to the Miners Gala, OT&JC, Joe Solo, Black Sabbath’s frontman and the Lionesses
Star cartoonist JAMIE BRITTON is in awe of a graphic novel of epic proportions that explores class, religion and globalisation via the strange cultivation of Ginseng in the US Midwest
GUILLERMO THOMAS is intrigued by a history of the Middle East that demonstrates how promising post colonial beginnings were snuffed out by Western imperialist interests
MARIA DUARTE recommends the intricate study of a high-performance and highly dysfuntional German family
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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