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Lot Essay
"Liberate the mass of people, give them a chance to think, to see, to cultivate their tastes," Léger counseled amid the revolutionary fervor in France during the mid-1930s. "They will be able in their turn to enjoy to the full all the latest inventions of modern art" (quoted in S. Wilson, "Fernand Léger, Art and Politics, 1935-1955," Fernand Léger, The Later Years, exh. cat., Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 1987, p. 58). Against the heady politics of Paris between the wars, Léger positioned modern art as an agent of change—capable of communicating to the masses in bold, legible terms the vision of a new and collective society. The new reality demanded an art that could not only keep pace with the speed of modernity but also, through the purity of its plastic beauty, provide a kind of aesthetic relief from the toils of the working man's labor. "From the beginning," Ina Conzen-Meairs has observed, "Léger was convinced that the role of art was to support modern man, who had lost his religious connections, in his search for a 'substitute for the diminished religion.' It should mean a heightening of the quality of life for the working man" ("Revolution and Tradition, The Metamorphosis of the Conception of Realism in the Late Works of Fernand Léger," ibid., pp. 13-14).
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" (quoted in E.F. Fry, ed., "Art and the People," Functions of Painting, New York, 1973, p. 145). As a complement to the monumental works which Léger painted in the 1930s, he also executed a number of smaller works which brought his new, humanist realism into more intimate proportions. In individual portraits of working men and women, such as the present L'Accordéoniste, Léger brings us into the world of the Modern Man. 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.
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" (quoted in E.F. Fry, ed., "Art and the People," Functions of Painting, New York, 1973, p. 145). As a complement to the monumental works which Léger painted in the 1930s, he also executed a number of smaller works which brought his new, humanist realism into more intimate proportions. In individual portraits of working men and women, such as the present L'Accordéoniste, Léger brings us into the world of the Modern Man. 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.