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Lot Essay
Femmes aux perroquets is one of a group of ceramic works made using 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 Femmes au perroquet, meaning that the incredibly socially-minded artist was able to bring color 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 several versions of Femmes au perroquet in various media adorn public institutions such as the Yale University Art Gallery, the Pérez Art Museum, Miami and the Musée Fernand Léger in Biot itself, which houses the 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.
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 orange, it has all the more striking a visual impact.
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 painted in 1935-1939 which is now in the collection of the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (Bauquier, no. 881; fig. 1). A more directly similar group to the figures holding the bird in Femmes au perroquet was shown in a large gouache which was sold by Christie's in 2008 (fig. 2). However, where in those two works Léger was clearly playing with a range of volumetric forms, rendered through tonal variations in his colors, 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 monumental figures, bird and trees.
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 orange, it has all the more striking a visual impact.
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 painted in 1935-1939 which is now in the collection of the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (Bauquier, no. 881; fig. 1). A more directly similar group to the figures holding the bird in Femmes au perroquet was shown in a large gouache which was sold by Christie's in 2008 (fig. 2). However, where in those two works Léger was clearly playing with a range of volumetric forms, rendered through tonal variations in his colors, 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 monumental figures, bird and trees.