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Lot Essay
Fernand Léger's Composition sur fond rouge was painted in 1929 and captures the atmosphere of that heady historical moment, with its peak of decadence and its all-too-vivid Great Crash. Its lyrical, Art Deco stylings, jazz-like configuration of motifs around the canvas and the free falling black and white elements in its borders, capture both the aesthetics of its era and Léger's clear enjoyment of his own liberation from the constraints of the architectonic style that had formerly characterized so many of his works. Influenced in part by contemporary music and in part by the Surreal movement which had involved so many of his friends and fellow artists during the same period, Léger abandoned the rigid verticals and horizontals of his works from the years just previous, introducing instead the sinewy forms that dance across and indeed burst from the canvas here.
The stone like form, encapsulated in—or perhaps hovering over—the quadrangular motif at the centre, relates to the motif of the statue, referencing a number of studies of the female form that Léger had made during this period, and has been depicted here using a more organic variation of the almost mechanical and geometric methods with which Léger had more recently treated "human" subjects. Here, he has taken advantage of the texture of the monochrome elements to heighten the dynamic range of contrasts within the composition. This is accentuated by the roaring base of scarlet in the background and the angular yellow step-forms towards the right that create a circular, cog-like motion, amongst a range of graphic treatments of black and white in spots, lines and wavering tonal forms of the enlarged organic elements which rhythmically sing throughout the picture. This sense of continual motion reveals the artist revelling in the presentation of fragmented objects in space, a notion linked to his cinematic output and again contrasting with the intense rigor, stillness and discipline of his paintings from only shortly prior. As the artist wrote: “The technique I emphasised is to isolate the object or the fragment of an object and to present it on the screen in close-ups of the largest possible scale. Enormous enlargement of an object or a fragment gives it a personality it never had before and in this way it can become a vehicle of entirely new lyric and plastic power.” (Fernand Léger, from "Une nouvelle realisme—l’objet” in La petite revue, vol. XI, Paris, Winter 1926). Here, it is a playful accessibility and rhythmic exuberance that dominate rather than the search for almost technical "harmony" or order.
The stone like form, encapsulated in—or perhaps hovering over—the quadrangular motif at the centre, relates to the motif of the statue, referencing a number of studies of the female form that Léger had made during this period, and has been depicted here using a more organic variation of the almost mechanical and geometric methods with which Léger had more recently treated "human" subjects. Here, he has taken advantage of the texture of the monochrome elements to heighten the dynamic range of contrasts within the composition. This is accentuated by the roaring base of scarlet in the background and the angular yellow step-forms towards the right that create a circular, cog-like motion, amongst a range of graphic treatments of black and white in spots, lines and wavering tonal forms of the enlarged organic elements which rhythmically sing throughout the picture. This sense of continual motion reveals the artist revelling in the presentation of fragmented objects in space, a notion linked to his cinematic output and again contrasting with the intense rigor, stillness and discipline of his paintings from only shortly prior. As the artist wrote: “The technique I emphasised is to isolate the object or the fragment of an object and to present it on the screen in close-ups of the largest possible scale. Enormous enlargement of an object or a fragment gives it a personality it never had before and in this way it can become a vehicle of entirely new lyric and plastic power.” (Fernand Léger, from "Une nouvelle realisme—l’objet” in La petite revue, vol. XI, Paris, Winter 1926). Here, it is a playful accessibility and rhythmic exuberance that dominate rather than the search for almost technical "harmony" or order.