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Lot Essay
'Liberate the mass of people, give them a chance to think, to see, to cultivate their tastes, [...] They will be able in their turn to enjoy to the full all the latest inventions of modern art' (F. Léger amid the 1930s fervor in France, quoted in S. Wilson, 'Fernand Léger: Art and Politics, 1935-1955' Fernand Léger: The Later Years, London, 1987, p. 58).
The everyman to whom Léger addressed his words might one day wear the colourful sweater featured in Buste de femme, a prototype of utilitarian and avant-garde design. Léger had great confidence in the common man: if the masses had not yet acquired an understanding of modern art, the fault rested with an oppressive social order that robbed them of the leisure to cultivate their taste. 'Above all, don't start assuming that the People don't care', he cautioned. 'When a man of the people gets dressed, he chooses: he chooses a blue tie or a red tie. He spends a lot of time making his choice. He has taste. He must be permitted to develop this taste' ('Art and the People', Functions of Painting, New York, 1973, p. 145).
Léger applies the principles of his New Realism to Buste de femme. 'Realism', Léger had stated years earlier, 'should be the simultaneous fusion of the three basic pictorial elements of line, form and colour' (quoted in I. Conzen-Meairs, exh. cat., op. cit., London, 1987, p. 11). Here, the artist applies the principles of his New Realism to this work and the abstraction of his earlier aesthetic is updated and made more accessible: the eponymous sweater is a modernist grid of bright colour contrasts, balanced by the flowing contour of the flower the young man holds and the decorative ornaments to his left. The emblematic yellows, greens, and reds stand out against the plain black-and-brown background--emphatically underlining the 'major social role' that colour had to accomplish, as Gilles Néret has observed. 'It contributed to enveloping the monotonous everyday realities. It dressed reality. The humblest objects could be and were calling out for colour to change the way people perceived their real purpose' (in F. Léger, New York, 1993, p. 195). Through the metaphor of colour, Léger's realism stood for his belief in the common man and in the formal efficacy of realism to reach him at home and in his world. 'To have the common touch was', Conzen-Meairs reminds us, 'part of Léger's conception of realism from the very beginning'. By the 1930s, however, it is 'no longer the purely artistic that stands in the foreground, but the hope for a greater intelligibility and a broader impact for his art...it is an expression of the hope that man will not remain the slave of the machine, and the system, but that he will have the possibility to realise himself and to liberate his spirit in order to ascend to a new dignity' (in exh. cat., op. cit., London, 1987, pp. 12, 14).
The everyman to whom Léger addressed his words might one day wear the colourful sweater featured in Buste de femme, a prototype of utilitarian and avant-garde design. Léger had great confidence in the common man: if the masses had not yet acquired an understanding of modern art, the fault rested with an oppressive social order that robbed them of the leisure to cultivate their taste. 'Above all, don't start assuming that the People don't care', he cautioned. 'When a man of the people gets dressed, he chooses: he chooses a blue tie or a red tie. He spends a lot of time making his choice. He has taste. He must be permitted to develop this taste' ('Art and the People', Functions of Painting, New York, 1973, p. 145).
Léger applies the principles of his New Realism to Buste de femme. 'Realism', Léger had stated years earlier, 'should be the simultaneous fusion of the three basic pictorial elements of line, form and colour' (quoted in I. Conzen-Meairs, exh. cat., op. cit., London, 1987, p. 11). Here, the artist applies the principles of his New Realism to this work and the abstraction of his earlier aesthetic is updated and made more accessible: the eponymous sweater is a modernist grid of bright colour contrasts, balanced by the flowing contour of the flower the young man holds and the decorative ornaments to his left. The emblematic yellows, greens, and reds stand out against the plain black-and-brown background--emphatically underlining the 'major social role' that colour had to accomplish, as Gilles Néret has observed. 'It contributed to enveloping the monotonous everyday realities. It dressed reality. The humblest objects could be and were calling out for colour to change the way people perceived their real purpose' (in F. Léger, New York, 1993, p. 195). Through the metaphor of colour, Léger's realism stood for his belief in the common man and in the formal efficacy of realism to reach him at home and in his world. 'To have the common touch was', Conzen-Meairs reminds us, 'part of Léger's conception of realism from the very beginning'. By the 1930s, however, it is 'no longer the purely artistic that stands in the foreground, but the hope for a greater intelligibility and a broader impact for his art...it is an expression of the hope that man will not remain the slave of the machine, and the system, but that he will have the possibility to realise himself and to liberate his spirit in order to ascend to a new dignity' (in exh. cat., op. cit., London, 1987, pp. 12, 14).