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Lot Essay
After his discharge from the French army in 1918, Fernand Léger’s art underwent a profound shift in style and purpose, as the artist described: “I discovered the people of France. And at the same time I was suddenly stunned by the sight of the open breech of a .75 cannon in full sunlight, confronted with the play of light on white metal. It needed nothing more than this for me to forget the abstract art of 1912-1913” (quoted in R. Chickering, ed., Great War, Total War, Cambridge, 2000, p. 509). His experience as a soldier encouraged him to increase the accessibility of his art, while a new interest in the modern aesthetic of the machine and the influence of the contemporary avant-garde movements Purism and De Stijl spurred the development of a visual idiom emphasizing clarity and order. The spare lines, uniform color, and compositional stability of La femme à la toilette of 1925 exemplifies Léger’s postwar period.
Purism, a movement created by Amédée Ozenfant and Le Corbusier (then known as Charles-Édouard Jeanneret), sought to break from the frenetic and disembodied shapes of prewar abstraction, which reveled in a chaos made repellant by the war. They eliminated decorative flourishes, paring their imagery down to fundamental underlying structures. In subject matter, too, they moved away from the illusionistic and imaginary, instead rooting their art in architectonic renderings of vases, plates, and bottles, objects whose “mechanical selection began with the earliest times…and whose general laws have endured” (quoted in K. Silver, Chaos and Classicism, exh. cat., The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2011, p. 29). Léger, who in 1924 opened an atelier with Ozenfant, likewise eliminated what he saw as extraneous affectations, reducing his subjects to their simplest forms and echoing the order of machine production in the precision of his technique.
Where the Purists eschewed the human body, however, Léger often prioritized figural representation. Modelled on the forms of the machine age, he transformed his subjects—frequently female—into smooth, mechanized structures. As the artist stated in his 1924 essay on the machine aesthetic: “Each artist possesses an offensive weapon that allows him to intimidate tradition. In the search for vividness and intensity, I have made use of the machine as other have used the nude body or the still life” (quoted in D. Kosinski, ed., Fernand Leger 1911-1924 The Rhythm of Modern Life, exh. cat., Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Munich, 1994, p. 121).
La femme à la toilette makes a direct equation between the human body and constructed form: the central red shape—which reads as both object and architectural element—has been bisected and positioned to merge with the woman, as her second half. Léger similarly employed this device in Femme tenant un vase [état définitif] (Bauquier, no. 527; The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York), where the severed half of a red vase evokes a classical column, a weapon, and an infant. In the present work, the femme herself is reduced to a single upraised arm and rigid, glossy hair characteristic of Léger’s representations of women and which, as Silver has noted, evokes the sheen of sheet metal (exh. cat., op. cit., 2011, p. 29).
The 1923 exhibition of Theo van Doesburg and Piet Mondrian’s De Stijl group was another formative point in the development of Leger’s artistic practice. The dynamic equilibrium Mondrian achieved by balancing stark black lines and fields of primary colors can been seen in the present work’s linear black bands and sliding panes of color. Léger’s composition does not contain Mondrian’s steely precision; rather, in La femme à la toilette the woman’s mirrored reflection, vanity, and the architectural space of the room itself overlap within the same plane, augmented by secondary colors and curved lines. This colorful agglomeration of forms recalls Synthetic Cubism’s collage technique, but here evokes architectural or mechanical schematics.
La femme à la toilette references not only contemporaneous movements, but art historical tradition as well. A celebrated motif in Renaissance love poetry, the “femme á la toilette” has been regularly employed as a titillating celebration of beauty, from Titian’s Jeune femme à sa toilette (Musée du Louvre, Paris) to François Boucher’s portrait of Madame du Pompadour, La toilette de Vénus (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). Léger here translates this theme into a modern idiom, the eroticism of the female body exchanged for the smooth suppleness of mechanical forms.
Purism, a movement created by Amédée Ozenfant and Le Corbusier (then known as Charles-Édouard Jeanneret), sought to break from the frenetic and disembodied shapes of prewar abstraction, which reveled in a chaos made repellant by the war. They eliminated decorative flourishes, paring their imagery down to fundamental underlying structures. In subject matter, too, they moved away from the illusionistic and imaginary, instead rooting their art in architectonic renderings of vases, plates, and bottles, objects whose “mechanical selection began with the earliest times…and whose general laws have endured” (quoted in K. Silver, Chaos and Classicism, exh. cat., The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2011, p. 29). Léger, who in 1924 opened an atelier with Ozenfant, likewise eliminated what he saw as extraneous affectations, reducing his subjects to their simplest forms and echoing the order of machine production in the precision of his technique.
Where the Purists eschewed the human body, however, Léger often prioritized figural representation. Modelled on the forms of the machine age, he transformed his subjects—frequently female—into smooth, mechanized structures. As the artist stated in his 1924 essay on the machine aesthetic: “Each artist possesses an offensive weapon that allows him to intimidate tradition. In the search for vividness and intensity, I have made use of the machine as other have used the nude body or the still life” (quoted in D. Kosinski, ed., Fernand Leger 1911-1924 The Rhythm of Modern Life, exh. cat., Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Munich, 1994, p. 121).
La femme à la toilette makes a direct equation between the human body and constructed form: the central red shape—which reads as both object and architectural element—has been bisected and positioned to merge with the woman, as her second half. Léger similarly employed this device in Femme tenant un vase [état définitif] (Bauquier, no. 527; The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York), where the severed half of a red vase evokes a classical column, a weapon, and an infant. In the present work, the femme herself is reduced to a single upraised arm and rigid, glossy hair characteristic of Léger’s representations of women and which, as Silver has noted, evokes the sheen of sheet metal (exh. cat., op. cit., 2011, p. 29).
The 1923 exhibition of Theo van Doesburg and Piet Mondrian’s De Stijl group was another formative point in the development of Leger’s artistic practice. The dynamic equilibrium Mondrian achieved by balancing stark black lines and fields of primary colors can been seen in the present work’s linear black bands and sliding panes of color. Léger’s composition does not contain Mondrian’s steely precision; rather, in La femme à la toilette the woman’s mirrored reflection, vanity, and the architectural space of the room itself overlap within the same plane, augmented by secondary colors and curved lines. This colorful agglomeration of forms recalls Synthetic Cubism’s collage technique, but here evokes architectural or mechanical schematics.
La femme à la toilette references not only contemporaneous movements, but art historical tradition as well. A celebrated motif in Renaissance love poetry, the “femme á la toilette” has been regularly employed as a titillating celebration of beauty, from Titian’s Jeune femme à sa toilette (Musée du Louvre, Paris) to François Boucher’s portrait of Madame du Pompadour, La toilette de Vénus (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). Léger here translates this theme into a modern idiom, the eroticism of the female body exchanged for the smooth suppleness of mechanical forms.