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Lot Essay
Fernand Léger's Une femme devant le paysage is an historic painting dating from 1921 which has a distinguished history both in terms of its ownership and also the exhibitions in which it has been shown. This picture was exhibited in the retrospective of Léger's work which was held at the Kunsthaus in Zurich in 1933. Following the artist's death, this picture remained in the hands of his widow, his second wife Nadia; it is currently being offered as part of the estate of renowned computing pioneer Max Palevsky.
It was in a special edition of Cahiers d'art dedicated to Léger and coinciding with his exhibition that Christian Zervos referred to the years between 1919 and 1924 as the artist's 'dynamic period' (C. Zervos, 'Fernand Léger est-il Cubiste?', in Cahiers d'art, no. 3-4, 1933, unpaginated). During this time, in the wake of the First World, Léger allowed the mechanical vortex-like appearance of his prior works to subside, reflecting his own absorption of the Rappel à l'ordre that exerted its sway on so much of the avant garde. Now, he began to explore geometric shapes rather than technological apparatus as his raw pictorial materials, turning especially to the human figure. 'I had broken down the human body, so I set about putting it together again and rediscovering the human face,' he explained. 'I wanted a rest, a breathing space. After the dynamism of the mechanical period, I felt a need for the staticity of large figures' (Léger, quoted in C. Lanchner, exh. cat., Fernand Léger, New York, 1998, p. 188). With this in mind, Léger created his first series of so-called Paysages animés, where human figures were shown in the countryside, sometimes with livestock too; Une femme devant le paysage takes an intriguing, domestic and intimate spin on this subject matter, presenting the woman in an interior with the countryside glimpsed through the panes of the window behind her. This intimacy may be heightened by the fact that Léger had only married relatively recently, implying that this figure could provide an insight into his own life. Une femme devant le paysage reveals to what degree Léger had shifted his subject matter too, embracing scenes that could almost be considered classical.
In Une femme devant le paysage, Léger explores the contrast between the organic forms of the woman and the rigid framework of the window and sill behind. The tone of her skin is echoed in the undulating hills behind her, while the framing device of the curtains, which provide an almost human silhouette at each side, continues the visual rhythm of her body's curves. This results in a painting filled with contrasts, the geometry of the window adding to the sense of volume of the woman in the foreground. Meanwhile, that regularity in the form of the window hints at the increasing interest Léger was to come to show in the Purism of his contemporaries such as Amedée Ozenfant and Le Corbusier during the 1920s. Léger has distilled this scene of the woman in an interior into an agglomeration of forms that are at once highly modern, echoing the technological crispness of the age of the machine of which he was such an adoring worshipper, and patently accessible, in contrast to the abstraction that had featured in his own works earlier and which came to the fore in the pictures of many of his contemporaries.
It is a mark of the artist's own esteem for this painting that not only did it remain in his posession until his death, but that it also featured in his celebrated 1933 retrospective at the Kunsthaus in Zurich. This exhibition, which was held the year after the Kunsthaus had held the first museum show devoted to Léger's fellow painter and Cubist pioneer Pablo Picasso, was an important milestone in the consolidation of Léger's international reputation. He himself attended the opening, where he gave a lecture and also screened his film, Ballet mécanique. It was to accompany this exhibition that Zervos published an edition of Cahiers d'art dedicated to Léger, containing the essay in which he asked, 'Is Fernand Léger a Cubist?' Certainly, at that point Léger was still well known for his contribution to Cubism, alongside Picasso, Georges Braque and Juan Gris. This exhibition did a great deal to reveal the other areas that Léger's art had explored, as is evident in Une femme devant le paysage itself.
During the early 1920s, when he had painted Une femme devant le paysage, Léger was gaining increasing prominence. It was during this time that he came to know Gerald and Sara Murphy, the wealthy couple who did so much to link the art world of Paris with the mécènes of New York and the United States in general. Léger's work came to have more and more exposure in the United States from this point, resulting in his later journeys and stays there. For Léger, New York was one of the great modern cities, as was Moscow, where Une femme devant le paysage would come to be exhibited in an important retrospective organised in 1963 in the Pushkin Museum where his work was shown alongside those of Georges Bauquier, his assistant and the mastermind behind the creation of Léger's catalogue raisonné, and Nadia Khodossievitch. One of Léger's earliest students at the Académie Moderne, which he had joined in 1924 when it had been based in the same building as his own studio and which gradually became essentially his own art school, Nadia was a Russian artist who had become more and more involved in the running of the establishment and became very close to Léger, marrying him in 1952, a couple of years after the death of his first wife, Jeanne, from whom he had been separated for several decades. It was partly through the efforts of Nadia, who owned Une femme devant le paysage, that the exhibition in Moscow took place, and also that the Musée national Fernand Léger in Biot was founded, greatly enriched by donations made by her and by Bauquier.
It was in a special edition of Cahiers d'art dedicated to Léger and coinciding with his exhibition that Christian Zervos referred to the years between 1919 and 1924 as the artist's 'dynamic period' (C. Zervos, 'Fernand Léger est-il Cubiste?', in Cahiers d'art, no. 3-4, 1933, unpaginated). During this time, in the wake of the First World, Léger allowed the mechanical vortex-like appearance of his prior works to subside, reflecting his own absorption of the Rappel à l'ordre that exerted its sway on so much of the avant garde. Now, he began to explore geometric shapes rather than technological apparatus as his raw pictorial materials, turning especially to the human figure. 'I had broken down the human body, so I set about putting it together again and rediscovering the human face,' he explained. 'I wanted a rest, a breathing space. After the dynamism of the mechanical period, I felt a need for the staticity of large figures' (Léger, quoted in C. Lanchner, exh. cat., Fernand Léger, New York, 1998, p. 188). With this in mind, Léger created his first series of so-called Paysages animés, where human figures were shown in the countryside, sometimes with livestock too; Une femme devant le paysage takes an intriguing, domestic and intimate spin on this subject matter, presenting the woman in an interior with the countryside glimpsed through the panes of the window behind her. This intimacy may be heightened by the fact that Léger had only married relatively recently, implying that this figure could provide an insight into his own life. Une femme devant le paysage reveals to what degree Léger had shifted his subject matter too, embracing scenes that could almost be considered classical.
In Une femme devant le paysage, Léger explores the contrast between the organic forms of the woman and the rigid framework of the window and sill behind. The tone of her skin is echoed in the undulating hills behind her, while the framing device of the curtains, which provide an almost human silhouette at each side, continues the visual rhythm of her body's curves. This results in a painting filled with contrasts, the geometry of the window adding to the sense of volume of the woman in the foreground. Meanwhile, that regularity in the form of the window hints at the increasing interest Léger was to come to show in the Purism of his contemporaries such as Amedée Ozenfant and Le Corbusier during the 1920s. Léger has distilled this scene of the woman in an interior into an agglomeration of forms that are at once highly modern, echoing the technological crispness of the age of the machine of which he was such an adoring worshipper, and patently accessible, in contrast to the abstraction that had featured in his own works earlier and which came to the fore in the pictures of many of his contemporaries.
It is a mark of the artist's own esteem for this painting that not only did it remain in his posession until his death, but that it also featured in his celebrated 1933 retrospective at the Kunsthaus in Zurich. This exhibition, which was held the year after the Kunsthaus had held the first museum show devoted to Léger's fellow painter and Cubist pioneer Pablo Picasso, was an important milestone in the consolidation of Léger's international reputation. He himself attended the opening, where he gave a lecture and also screened his film, Ballet mécanique. It was to accompany this exhibition that Zervos published an edition of Cahiers d'art dedicated to Léger, containing the essay in which he asked, 'Is Fernand Léger a Cubist?' Certainly, at that point Léger was still well known for his contribution to Cubism, alongside Picasso, Georges Braque and Juan Gris. This exhibition did a great deal to reveal the other areas that Léger's art had explored, as is evident in Une femme devant le paysage itself.
During the early 1920s, when he had painted Une femme devant le paysage, Léger was gaining increasing prominence. It was during this time that he came to know Gerald and Sara Murphy, the wealthy couple who did so much to link the art world of Paris with the mécènes of New York and the United States in general. Léger's work came to have more and more exposure in the United States from this point, resulting in his later journeys and stays there. For Léger, New York was one of the great modern cities, as was Moscow, where Une femme devant le paysage would come to be exhibited in an important retrospective organised in 1963 in the Pushkin Museum where his work was shown alongside those of Georges Bauquier, his assistant and the mastermind behind the creation of Léger's catalogue raisonné, and Nadia Khodossievitch. One of Léger's earliest students at the Académie Moderne, which he had joined in 1924 when it had been based in the same building as his own studio and which gradually became essentially his own art school, Nadia was a Russian artist who had become more and more involved in the running of the establishment and became very close to Léger, marrying him in 1952, a couple of years after the death of his first wife, Jeanne, from whom he had been separated for several decades. It was partly through the efforts of Nadia, who owned Une femme devant le paysage, that the exhibition in Moscow took place, and also that the Musée national Fernand Léger in Biot was founded, greatly enriched by donations made by her and by Bauquier.