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Lot Essay
In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Léger discarded the rigid frames of his Purist-influenced compositions and allowed previously grounded objects to float freely on the canvas. The geometric forms that had governed the structure of his paintings gave way, although not completely, in favor of more organic and figurative forms. His aesthetic of a pictorial harmony drawn from contrasts was fully realized in his new rhythmic canvases, in which the democracy of subject matter gave rise to most extreme and unpredictable forms of representational plasticity.
In many of the paintings of the period, Léger included a central element of a key or set of keys, none other than his own house keys on a ring. The appearance of the key is a marker, a recurring visual signifier that tracked the evolutionary process Léger had initiated in his art and which was already quickly gathering momentum. The artist was in effect unlocking and opening the door, to pass from one phase to the next in his painting, moving from the high classicism of the mid-1920s to the vital, more liberated forms of what he called the “new realism,” founded upon his concept of the object in place.
Léger related the story behind such motifs: “One day I painted a bunch of keys on a canvas. They were my own keys. I had no idea what I was going to place next to them. I needed something absolutely different from the keys. When I finished working, I went out. I had hardly gone a few steps when what did I see in a shop window? A postcard of the Mona Lisa! I understood at once. What could provide a greater contrast to the keys? She was what I needed. And that’s how the Mona Lisa came into the picture. And following this I added a tin of sardines. It all added up to the sharpest possible contrast... I achieved the most risky painting in this way from the point of view of contrasted objects. For as far as I am concerned, the Mona Lisa is an object like any other” (quoted in P. de Francia, Fernand Léger, New Haven, 1983, p. 111).
In many of the paintings of the period, Léger included a central element of a key or set of keys, none other than his own house keys on a ring. The appearance of the key is a marker, a recurring visual signifier that tracked the evolutionary process Léger had initiated in his art and which was already quickly gathering momentum. The artist was in effect unlocking and opening the door, to pass from one phase to the next in his painting, moving from the high classicism of the mid-1920s to the vital, more liberated forms of what he called the “new realism,” founded upon his concept of the object in place.
Léger related the story behind such motifs: “One day I painted a bunch of keys on a canvas. They were my own keys. I had no idea what I was going to place next to them. I needed something absolutely different from the keys. When I finished working, I went out. I had hardly gone a few steps when what did I see in a shop window? A postcard of the Mona Lisa! I understood at once. What could provide a greater contrast to the keys? She was what I needed. And that’s how the Mona Lisa came into the picture. And following this I added a tin of sardines. It all added up to the sharpest possible contrast... I achieved the most risky painting in this way from the point of view of contrasted objects. For as far as I am concerned, the Mona Lisa is an object like any other” (quoted in P. de Francia, Fernand Léger, New Haven, 1983, p. 111).