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Lot Essay
Painted in 1934, Composition au veston is a whimsical depiction of disparate objects and flat areas of vibrant colors, creating a musicality and rhythm evocative of Léger's preoccupation with the perfect harmony of color and form. The composition defies a sense of gravity and transcends the earthbound nature of a traditional landscape or still life. The imagery consists of a jacket splayed over a rectangular plinth, the scroll of a cello or violin, and strands of playful spheres bobbling atop one another like plumes of smoke, all set against a rich blue amorphous plane of color with yellow organic forms floating throughout.
Although Léger was never affiliated with the Surrealists, he had contact and friendships with many of the movement's members and it was through their indirect influence that his art began to show an increasing regard for abstraction during the 1930s. The rappel à l'ordre that had followed the chaos of the First World War, summoning artists to return to classical values of form and humanism, had marked his work for a long time. However, by 1934, this call to order had long since ceased to influence his painting as the artist moved toward abstraction.
While Léger would continue to create works that showed everyday scenes in his trademark style of bold, outlined, well-shaded forms in unmodulated bursts of pure color, he began to explore his subjects with a new sense of freedom and dynamism, reaching a less structured mode of abstraction. Speaking of his work at this time Léger stated, "I dispersed my objects in space and kept them all together while at the same time making them radiate out from the surface of the picture. A tricky interplay of harmonies and rhythms made up of background and surface colors, guidelines, distances and oppositions" (quoted in W. Schmalenbach, Fernand Léger, New York, 1976, p. 32).
Composition au veston, with its exuberant explosion of planes and spheres, and its daring juxtaposition of disparate objects, is a work pulsating with rhythm and energy, whose dynamism displays an ongoing process of experimentation and discovery by an artist who had always been preoccupied with movement.
(fig. 1) The artist, 1933. Photograph by André Rogi.
Although Léger was never affiliated with the Surrealists, he had contact and friendships with many of the movement's members and it was through their indirect influence that his art began to show an increasing regard for abstraction during the 1930s. The rappel à l'ordre that had followed the chaos of the First World War, summoning artists to return to classical values of form and humanism, had marked his work for a long time. However, by 1934, this call to order had long since ceased to influence his painting as the artist moved toward abstraction.
While Léger would continue to create works that showed everyday scenes in his trademark style of bold, outlined, well-shaded forms in unmodulated bursts of pure color, he began to explore his subjects with a new sense of freedom and dynamism, reaching a less structured mode of abstraction. Speaking of his work at this time Léger stated, "I dispersed my objects in space and kept them all together while at the same time making them radiate out from the surface of the picture. A tricky interplay of harmonies and rhythms made up of background and surface colors, guidelines, distances and oppositions" (quoted in W. Schmalenbach, Fernand Léger, New York, 1976, p. 32).
Composition au veston, with its exuberant explosion of planes and spheres, and its daring juxtaposition of disparate objects, is a work pulsating with rhythm and energy, whose dynamism displays an ongoing process of experimentation and discovery by an artist who had always been preoccupied with movement.
(fig. 1) The artist, 1933. Photograph by André Rogi.