Nadia Khodasevich Léger was a Belarussian-French artist.
Background
She was born into a poor family of Polish descent in Asiecišča (also known as Osetishche), then in the Vitebsk Governorate of the Russian Empire, now in the Vitebsk Region of northern Belarus, a few miles west of Lepiel, and roughly equidistant from Vitebsk, Polatsk and Minsk.
Education
From 1919 to 1921, she studied at an art workshop in Smolensk with avante garde artists Władysław Strzemiński and Kazimir Malevich. She then studied under Miłosz Kotarbiński at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts from 1922, where she met and then married Polish painter Stanisław Grabowski in 1923.
Career
She was the first wife of Polish painter Stanisław Grabowski and the second wife of French artist Fernand Léger. The Russian form of her name can be transliterated as Nadezhda Khodasevich or Khodassevich or Khodasievitch. And from the Polish form, Wanda Chodasiewicz.
She was a cousin of poet Vladislav Khodasevich.
The couple moved to Paris in 1924, and she then studied at the Académie Moderne in Paris, led by Fernand Léger and Amédée Ozenfant. Léger asked her to teach at the Academy, which she did until his death in 1955.
(The Académie Moderne became the Académie de l"Art Contemporain in 1931). Her work was exhibited regularly in Paris from 1926 to 1929, and with the Cercle et Carré association in the 1930s, under the name "Wanda Chodasiewicz-Grabowska".
She later preferred the name "Nadia".
She was involved with the a.r. group which donated art to a modern art museum in Łódź in 1929, the Muzeum Sztuki w Łodzi. Fernand Léger remained outside France from October 1940 to December 1945, but Nadia remained in Paris during the occupation of France in the Second World War. She is believed to have been involved with the French resistance.
She collaborated with architect Andreï Svetchine to build the Fernand Léger Museum in Biot, Alpes-Maritimes near Antibes in 1960, which was donated to the French state in 1967.
The French Minister of Culture, André Malraux, opened the Musée national Fernand Léger on 4 February 1969. She also converted Léger"s farm at Lisores in Normandy into a museum, the Ferme-Musée Fernand Léger, completed in 1970.
She died in Grasse.