Due to his modernist celebration of popular culture and the laboring classes, French avant-garde artist Fernand Léger (1881-1955) was vaunted by the French Communist Party during the Cold War yet also became a predecessor and model for Pop artists identified with U.S. consumer culture. This paper proposes to explore Léger’s contradictory significations and Cold War legacy. Léger was in exile in the U.S. from 1940 to 1945, and when he returned to France, he, like Picasso and other artists, joined the Communist Party and now-discredited loyalists such as Roger Garaudy wrote glowing biographies about him. Due to this affiliation, Léger was often vilified in the U.S. Michigan Congressman George Dondero included Léger in his list of artists who were agents of communism and James Burnham, author of Containment or Liberation? (1953), reviewed Léger’s retrospective negatively. The paper will present recently released materials from the FBI file on Léger revealing that French informants reported on his artistic projects for the United Nations and that his Paris studio was taken off of approved lists for veterans. Léger’s post-war style was, however, neither a celebration of Social Realism nor an unqualified support of Stalinist ideology but nevertheless figural work meant to be accessible to popular classes. Although in some ways the antithesis of the triumphant individualism identified with U.S. Abstract Expressionism, Léger’s work had commercial appeal. It was included in a group exhibition in 1945 of design work sponsored by the Container Corporation of America and then in a major retrospective in 1953, both at the Chicago Art Institute. Between 1948 and 1951, many American artists studied in his studio on the G.I. bill including Sam Francis, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, and Robert Colescott. Other artists adopted Léger’s ideas about the mass-produced object: Andy Warhol once owned a study for Léger’s Mechanic (1920); and Roy Lichtenstein cites Léger as an important model for Pop artists. The diverse meanings of Léger’s work to the PCF and to U.S. artists and corporate designers indicate not only the contingencies of social and political contexts of the Cold War but also shifting ideas about the nation, the collective and the role of the artist. This paper will consider Léger as a figure who was claimed as a “man of the people” by the French Communist Party and represented Communism to many in the U.S. yet whose work also represented to Pop artists the collapse of high/low categories of culture.