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Lot Essay
Les femmes au perroquet is a monumental mural comprising 77 ceramic tiles and towering over the viewer, four metres tall and six wide. This is one of a group of ceramic works made using Fernand Léger's designs following his discovery of the medium in the early 1950s. It was through Roger Brice, one of his former students and a master ceramicist, that he had come to understand the potential of ceramics to enlarge his own images, resulting in murals that allowed him to present his images on a vast scale, as he had already done in works in other media such as mosaic. Brice and his son Claude, also one of Léger's students, were instrumental in assisting the artist to create these vast works such as Les femmes au perroquet, meaning that the incredibly socially-minded artist was able to bring colour and happiness to even greater numbers of people. Léger's desire to improve the surroundings of as many people as possible through his art is fulfilled in the fact that smaller examples of Les femmes au perroquet in various media adorn public institutions such as the Yale University Art Gallery, the Miami Art Museum and the Musée Fernand Léger itself, which houses the original black and white ceramic example from 1951. A variant was acquired the following year by the legendary restaurant, the Colombe d'Or, at Saint-Paul-de-Vence.
In Les femmes au perroquet, Léger's infectious sense of fun is palpable in the wide, open faces of the figures within the composition and especially the bird itself. A sense of dynamism is introduced by the ambiguous leaves or feathers which appear to be gracefully fluttering down the composition. Léger's restrained palette adds to the vitality of the picture: rendered in black, white and a vivid red, it has all the more striking a visual impact.
Les femmes au perroquet appears to have taken as its inspiration a subject that had appeared in Composition aux deux perroquets, a monumental canvas that Léger created in 1935-39 which is now in the collection of the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. A more directly similar group to the figures holding the bird in Les femmes au perroquet was shown in a large gouache on board which was sold by Christie's in 2008 for $1,426,500. However, where in those two works Léger was clearly playing with a range of volumetric forms, rendered through tonal variations in his colours, in Les femmes au perroquet he has abandoned such illusionism, instead harnessing the rich visual effect of the deep, glowing red background, the bold black outlines and the brilliant white of the gigantic figures, bird and trees.
In Les femmes au perroquet, Léger's infectious sense of fun is palpable in the wide, open faces of the figures within the composition and especially the bird itself. A sense of dynamism is introduced by the ambiguous leaves or feathers which appear to be gracefully fluttering down the composition. Léger's restrained palette adds to the vitality of the picture: rendered in black, white and a vivid red, it has all the more striking a visual impact.
Les femmes au perroquet appears to have taken as its inspiration a subject that had appeared in Composition aux deux perroquets, a monumental canvas that Léger created in 1935-39 which is now in the collection of the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. A more directly similar group to the figures holding the bird in Les femmes au perroquet was shown in a large gouache on board which was sold by Christie's in 2008 for $1,426,500. However, where in those two works Léger was clearly playing with a range of volumetric forms, rendered through tonal variations in his colours, in Les femmes au perroquet he has abandoned such illusionism, instead harnessing the rich visual effect of the deep, glowing red background, the bold black outlines and the brilliant white of the gigantic figures, bird and trees.