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Lot Essay
Georges Bauquier confirmed the authenticity of this work in 1988 (cf. label on the reverse of the drawing).
Executed in 1921, Etude pour Le grand déjeuner shows two women facing the viewer, gazing out from the sheet. They have been captured with a startlingly modern economy of means. The faces have been reduced to spheres, the waving hair appearing like some form of corrugated vinyl, while the background has a crisp geometric simplicity that reflects the increasing interest in Purism that would come to mark Léger's Rappel à l'ordre.
This work is clearly a study for Léger's celebrated masterpiece, Le grand déjeuner (Bauquier, no. 311; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; fig.1), in the Museum of Modern Art, New York, which was painted the same year. A comparison between the final oil and Etude pour Le grand déjeuner reveals some of the process of Léger's investigation of form. For where in the painting, the faces are relatively detailed, in this study the smooth surfaces of the women's heads, faces and bodies have a concise geometric quality that owes far more to the world of machines, of factory-production, steel and technology, than it does to the art of former ages, to Rubens or Boucher. The beauty of the flesh has been replaced by a new beauty with a lustrous mechanical sheen. Here, the iconography of modern living has been applied to a scene reminiscent of the life of French women that also recalls and banishes the spirit of Manet's Déjeuner sur l'herbe. Technology in the world of domesticity, domesticity in the world of technology... 'The beautiful is everywhere, in the arrangement of a set of saucepans on a white kitchen wall as well as in a museum,' Léger explained.
'Modern beauty is almost always combined with practical necessity. Examples: the steam engine, which is coming closer and closer to the perfect cylinder; the automobile chassis, which, because of the need for speed, has been lowered, elongated, streamlined, and which has become a balanced relationship of curbed and horizontal lines, born from the geometric order.
Geometric form is dominant. It penetrates every area with its visual and psychological influence. The poster shatters the landscape, the electric meter on the wall destroys the calendar' (F. Léger, Functions of Painting, ed. E.F. Fry, London, 1973, pp. 63-64).
Executed in 1921, Etude pour Le grand déjeuner shows two women facing the viewer, gazing out from the sheet. They have been captured with a startlingly modern economy of means. The faces have been reduced to spheres, the waving hair appearing like some form of corrugated vinyl, while the background has a crisp geometric simplicity that reflects the increasing interest in Purism that would come to mark Léger's Rappel à l'ordre.
This work is clearly a study for Léger's celebrated masterpiece, Le grand déjeuner (Bauquier, no. 311; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; fig.1), in the Museum of Modern Art, New York, which was painted the same year. A comparison between the final oil and Etude pour Le grand déjeuner reveals some of the process of Léger's investigation of form. For where in the painting, the faces are relatively detailed, in this study the smooth surfaces of the women's heads, faces and bodies have a concise geometric quality that owes far more to the world of machines, of factory-production, steel and technology, than it does to the art of former ages, to Rubens or Boucher. The beauty of the flesh has been replaced by a new beauty with a lustrous mechanical sheen. Here, the iconography of modern living has been applied to a scene reminiscent of the life of French women that also recalls and banishes the spirit of Manet's Déjeuner sur l'herbe. Technology in the world of domesticity, domesticity in the world of technology... 'The beautiful is everywhere, in the arrangement of a set of saucepans on a white kitchen wall as well as in a museum,' Léger explained.
'Modern beauty is almost always combined with practical necessity. Examples: the steam engine, which is coming closer and closer to the perfect cylinder; the automobile chassis, which, because of the need for speed, has been lowered, elongated, streamlined, and which has become a balanced relationship of curbed and horizontal lines, born from the geometric order.
Geometric form is dominant. It penetrates every area with its visual and psychological influence. The poster shatters the landscape, the electric meter on the wall destroys the calendar' (F. Léger, Functions of Painting, ed. E.F. Fry, London, 1973, pp. 63-64).