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Lot Essay
Léger, Braque and Picasso were all born within a year of each other, each artist had his beginnings as a modernist in cubism, and they all painted prolifically and well to the very end of lengthy careers. Léger holds the special distinction among them of having executed one of his largest and greatest canvases near the very end of his life, the état définitif of La Grande Parade, 1954 (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; fig. 1). Far from slowing down, Léger appears to have grown ever more eager to engage in diverse projects as he crossed his seventieth year. He commanded a small army of studio assistants, artisans and craftsmen, to help him create ceramics, large sculptures, mosaics and stained-glass windows.
Remarkably, Léger found time to paint numerous easel-sized paintings as well, some of which are directly related to his larger compositions. There are also independent figures, abstract pictures that were perhaps intended to become murals, and most numerous of all, still-life paintings, such as the present Le vase de fleurs dans l'atelier, which were done in the time-honored tradition of the French nature morte, but are better appreciated as studio subjects, because they most often depict the contents of the artist's working environment, the atelier. In this regard, the eight magnificent paintings of Braque's Atelier series, done between 1949 and 1955, come to mind, and suggest that for both men the atelier picture is the painter's way of looking back on and assessing his life in art. Each object included in a studio painting possesses some professional, or perhaps even sentimental or nostalgic significance for the artist. The vase of flowers is the key element here: it plays the role of a common, generic nature morte subject set atop a table, beside which we note the painter's easel, draped with his smock, and behind that a canvas showing a young woman's head in profile. A cylinder for storing a rolled canvas or drawings juts out from the upper right edge of the composition. The far wall is stacked with canvases still in progress or already completed.
Léger's postwar pictures usually display one or the other of two formal approaches, and very often he treated a subject twice, first in one and then in the other manner. The present painting is related in this way to Le cadre noir dans l'atelier, 1950 (Bauquier, no. 1378), in which Leger employed his first approach--black contours define the figure or object, which like a vessel contain local color, which may have been derived from the actual object or arbitrarily selected for pictorial purposes. Léger painted Le vase de fleurs dans l'atelier in his alternative, second approach, retaining the black contours and even strengthening them, while discarding all local color. The imagery is consequently flatter, the design more graphic and reductive, having been rendered entirely as black outlines on a white ground which has been partly covered with bands and patches of pure color (for the origin of this manner, see lot 27). The effect is essentially architectural; Léger likened this type of painting to the flatness of a wall, broken up with color to create a more lively surface. Léger wrote in 1938: "Color can enter into play with a surprising and active force without any need to incorporate instructive or sentimental elements. A wall can be destroyed by the application of pure colors... A wall can made to advance or recede, to become visually mobile. All this with color" ("Color in the World," in E.F. Fry, ed., Fernand Léger: Functions of Painting, New York, 1973, p. 123). Léger's late "mural" style represents the ultimate evolution in the basic principles of painting that he set forth in his celebrated Contrastes de formes series of 1913-1914--"the simultaneous ordering of three plastic components: Lines, Forms and Colors" ("The Origins of Painting," quoted in ibid., p. 4).
(fig. 1) Fernand Léger in his studio at Gif-sur-Yvette, leaning on La partie de campagne (1953), and standing before La Grande Parade (état définitif). Photograph by Robert Doisneau.
Remarkably, Léger found time to paint numerous easel-sized paintings as well, some of which are directly related to his larger compositions. There are also independent figures, abstract pictures that were perhaps intended to become murals, and most numerous of all, still-life paintings, such as the present Le vase de fleurs dans l'atelier, which were done in the time-honored tradition of the French nature morte, but are better appreciated as studio subjects, because they most often depict the contents of the artist's working environment, the atelier. In this regard, the eight magnificent paintings of Braque's Atelier series, done between 1949 and 1955, come to mind, and suggest that for both men the atelier picture is the painter's way of looking back on and assessing his life in art. Each object included in a studio painting possesses some professional, or perhaps even sentimental or nostalgic significance for the artist. The vase of flowers is the key element here: it plays the role of a common, generic nature morte subject set atop a table, beside which we note the painter's easel, draped with his smock, and behind that a canvas showing a young woman's head in profile. A cylinder for storing a rolled canvas or drawings juts out from the upper right edge of the composition. The far wall is stacked with canvases still in progress or already completed.
Léger's postwar pictures usually display one or the other of two formal approaches, and very often he treated a subject twice, first in one and then in the other manner. The present painting is related in this way to Le cadre noir dans l'atelier, 1950 (Bauquier, no. 1378), in which Leger employed his first approach--black contours define the figure or object, which like a vessel contain local color, which may have been derived from the actual object or arbitrarily selected for pictorial purposes. Léger painted Le vase de fleurs dans l'atelier in his alternative, second approach, retaining the black contours and even strengthening them, while discarding all local color. The imagery is consequently flatter, the design more graphic and reductive, having been rendered entirely as black outlines on a white ground which has been partly covered with bands and patches of pure color (for the origin of this manner, see lot 27). The effect is essentially architectural; Léger likened this type of painting to the flatness of a wall, broken up with color to create a more lively surface. Léger wrote in 1938: "Color can enter into play with a surprising and active force without any need to incorporate instructive or sentimental elements. A wall can be destroyed by the application of pure colors... A wall can made to advance or recede, to become visually mobile. All this with color" ("Color in the World," in E.F. Fry, ed., Fernand Léger: Functions of Painting, New York, 1973, p. 123). Léger's late "mural" style represents the ultimate evolution in the basic principles of painting that he set forth in his celebrated Contrastes de formes series of 1913-1914--"the simultaneous ordering of three plastic components: Lines, Forms and Colors" ("The Origins of Painting," quoted in ibid., p. 4).
(fig. 1) Fernand Léger in his studio at Gif-sur-Yvette, leaning on La partie de campagne (1953), and standing before La Grande Parade (état définitif). Photograph by Robert Doisneau.