.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Léger returned to France in December 1945, following five years of wartime exile. The return to his homeland corresponded with a period of intense creativity for the artist. In the political climate of post-war France, it was now more important than ever to develop a strikingly novel, but still decorative approach to the modern presentation of objects, in order to create an art that was accessible to the working classes. In these years, Léger spent considerable time with the poet, Paul Eluard, who had become a prominent voice of the Resistance during the war. Léger painted Eluard’s portrait (fig. 1), a sister picture to the present work. Tête de femme (Figure II) was exhibited alongside other related paintings at the inaugural exhibition of the Sidney Janis Gallery in 1948, soon after it was painted (fig. 2).
In these pictures, Léger retains the black contours of the face while discarding all local color. The imagery is graphic and reductive, having been rendered entirely as black outlines on a white ground which has been partly covered with bands and patches of pure color—in this case red, green and yellow—which are not directly tied to the form. The woman’s face has become a kind of object depicted as volume, line and color, with no psychological insight or sense of personal individuality. It exists primarily for its plastic qualities and potential. Here, as Leger explained, “The human figure remains purposely inexpressive” (Functions of Painting, Paris, 1973, p. 155). In the catalogue for his 1952 exhibition at Louis Carré Gallery, The Figure in Leger’s Art, he again emphasized the need for the artist to break away from the sentimentality of subjects such as landscapes and portraits: “The object has replaced the subject, abstract art has freed us, and we can now consider the human figure not as a sentimental value, but solely as a plastic value…I know that this very radical idea of the figure as an object revolts a lot of people, but I cannot do anything about that. In my latest paintings, which have figures related to subjects, perhaps you will think that the human figure tends to become a major object. The future will tell if that is better in plastic terms or if it is a mistake. In any case, the present arrangement is still dominated by the contrast in values which is the whole point of this evolution” (quoted in Y. Brunhammer, Fernand Leger, The Monumental Art, Paris 2005, p. 96).
The present work is from the collection of George S. Rosenthal, a prescient collector, who distinguished himself in the field of graphic design in the early 1950s. As a publisher of Portfolio, he ran one of the most influential graphic design magazines of the 20th century. Rosenthal’s family owned a printing press called S. Rosenthal and Co., and created Zebra Press to publish pictorial paperbacks and innovative, affordable photojournalist books including Weegee’s legendary Naked City. Rosenthal, who was also a photographer, attended Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’s school, The Chicago School of Design, and was close to artists like Man Ray and Moholy-Nagy himself. Rosenthal conceived Portfolio as a luxurious and avant-garde publication, bringing together the finest quality paper and printing methods with his new Bauhaus aesthetic inspiration. Alexey Brodovitch, the acclaimed visionary art director of Harper’s Bazaar between 1934 and 1958, served as Portfolio’s Art Director. To maintain the publication’s aesthetic integrity, they chose to forgo advertising, which made it commercially impractical; it lasted only three issues but its impact was immediate and wide-ranging. Portfolio featured art as an essential part of its avant-garde layouts, which Brodovitch and Rosenthal oversaw, including articles on artists such as Francisco Goya and Alexander Calder, as well as a feature on graffiti art. Most famously, Hans Namuth’s cinematic photographs of Jackson Pollock flinging paint upon his canvases appeared in Portfolio’s third issue in 1951.
In these pictures, Léger retains the black contours of the face while discarding all local color. The imagery is graphic and reductive, having been rendered entirely as black outlines on a white ground which has been partly covered with bands and patches of pure color—in this case red, green and yellow—which are not directly tied to the form. The woman’s face has become a kind of object depicted as volume, line and color, with no psychological insight or sense of personal individuality. It exists primarily for its plastic qualities and potential. Here, as Leger explained, “The human figure remains purposely inexpressive” (Functions of Painting, Paris, 1973, p. 155). In the catalogue for his 1952 exhibition at Louis Carré Gallery, The Figure in Leger’s Art, he again emphasized the need for the artist to break away from the sentimentality of subjects such as landscapes and portraits: “The object has replaced the subject, abstract art has freed us, and we can now consider the human figure not as a sentimental value, but solely as a plastic value…I know that this very radical idea of the figure as an object revolts a lot of people, but I cannot do anything about that. In my latest paintings, which have figures related to subjects, perhaps you will think that the human figure tends to become a major object. The future will tell if that is better in plastic terms or if it is a mistake. In any case, the present arrangement is still dominated by the contrast in values which is the whole point of this evolution” (quoted in Y. Brunhammer, Fernand Leger, The Monumental Art, Paris 2005, p. 96).
The present work is from the collection of George S. Rosenthal, a prescient collector, who distinguished himself in the field of graphic design in the early 1950s. As a publisher of Portfolio, he ran one of the most influential graphic design magazines of the 20th century. Rosenthal’s family owned a printing press called S. Rosenthal and Co., and created Zebra Press to publish pictorial paperbacks and innovative, affordable photojournalist books including Weegee’s legendary Naked City. Rosenthal, who was also a photographer, attended Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’s school, The Chicago School of Design, and was close to artists like Man Ray and Moholy-Nagy himself. Rosenthal conceived Portfolio as a luxurious and avant-garde publication, bringing together the finest quality paper and printing methods with his new Bauhaus aesthetic inspiration. Alexey Brodovitch, the acclaimed visionary art director of Harper’s Bazaar between 1934 and 1958, served as Portfolio’s Art Director. To maintain the publication’s aesthetic integrity, they chose to forgo advertising, which made it commercially impractical; it lasted only three issues but its impact was immediate and wide-ranging. Portfolio featured art as an essential part of its avant-garde layouts, which Brodovitch and Rosenthal oversaw, including articles on artists such as Francisco Goya and Alexander Calder, as well as a feature on graffiti art. Most famously, Hans Namuth’s cinematic photographs of Jackson Pollock flinging paint upon his canvases appeared in Portfolio’s third issue in 1951.