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Lot Essay
Upon his return to his native France after a five year long sojourn in the United States, Fernand Léger arrived brimming with a revived creative energy and artistic ambition, seeking to take on new challenges and experiments even in this later age. In this new phase of the postwar period, Léger continued to explore themes and ideas that had informed his earlier work, with the ultimate goal of generating creative harmony in his art though shape and color.
“Art and the image are the product of harmonious relationships between shapes, lines and colors. Those are three forces that should govern a work of art. If the harmonious organization of these three key factors can also incorporate elements of the real world, the resulting composition can be even better and richer. However, these elements must be subordinate to the three factors mentioned previously. When combined in an abstract work, these relationships are purely decorative. But if objects are included in the composition—free objects with authentic artistic value, the resulting images have as much variety and depth as a depiction of the imitated subject.”
- Fernand Léger
The biomorphic vegetal forms that had begun to appear in Léger’s work in the 1920s are present in Une figure dans un paysage. Whilst his earlier work had celebrated technology and industry and championed modernity, Léger’s interest in the natural world began to grow when he inherited his family’s farm in Normandy. There, he collected natural objects from his walks in the countryside, bringing back pebbles, feathers and leaves which he would transform into central elements of his compositions. He later explained that this approach was inspired by the habits of French farmers, who always used the natural materials available to them, leaving nothing to waste. During his time in the United States, he had observed the opposite on American farms, which were strewn with abandoned machinery and spare parts. He reflected on these contrasts: “I was struck by the difference between the forests in America and those in Normandy. Where I grew up, wood was precious, and farmers picked up every last branch like they would pick up stray nails. In forests in America, tree trunks just rot where they fall. No one uses them.” (Fernand Léger: The Later Years, exh. cat., Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 1987, p. 52).
These themes of preservation and abandonment are present in Une figure dans un paysage, with its composition of seemingly unrelated objects, which include chains, photographs, and branches. They evoke the artistic practices of found objects and photomontage, in which artists brought together objects often thought of as disposable and commonplace. Léger however chooses to juxtapose these objects through the medium of oil painting—one heavily associated with fine art and cultural heritage. The themes of preservation and abandonment are further explored through Léger’s inclusion of a photograph—which, rather uniquely for the artist, is a self-portrait. Léger chooses to simultaneously depict himself in the new, modern but ‘disposable’ medium of photography and the traditional medium of oil painting, one associated with cultural preservation.
The bright, saturated colors in the painting evoke Léger’s impressions of the desert expanses of the American West, which he had explored during his years in the United States. “One of my favorite memories of my visit was my drive from Texas to Arizona. Travelling through that furnace, we shouted and screamed in front of an epic parade of giant cacti, rocks, sand and oil wells.” (C. Lancher, Fernand Léger: American Connections, exh. cat. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1998, p. 53). These impressions of an alien landscape would inform his paintings of the post-war period, when he created canvases depicting landscapes of the impossible, as is the case in the present work. These would later reach an apogee in his monumental paintings of the 1950s, including one of the most important works in his oeuvre, the final version of La Grande Parade, 1954, which now hangs in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.
“Art and the image are the product of harmonious relationships between shapes, lines and colors. Those are three forces that should govern a work of art. If the harmonious organization of these three key factors can also incorporate elements of the real world, the resulting composition can be even better and richer. However, these elements must be subordinate to the three factors mentioned previously. When combined in an abstract work, these relationships are purely decorative. But if objects are included in the composition—free objects with authentic artistic value, the resulting images have as much variety and depth as a depiction of the imitated subject.”
- Fernand Léger
The biomorphic vegetal forms that had begun to appear in Léger’s work in the 1920s are present in Une figure dans un paysage. Whilst his earlier work had celebrated technology and industry and championed modernity, Léger’s interest in the natural world began to grow when he inherited his family’s farm in Normandy. There, he collected natural objects from his walks in the countryside, bringing back pebbles, feathers and leaves which he would transform into central elements of his compositions. He later explained that this approach was inspired by the habits of French farmers, who always used the natural materials available to them, leaving nothing to waste. During his time in the United States, he had observed the opposite on American farms, which were strewn with abandoned machinery and spare parts. He reflected on these contrasts: “I was struck by the difference between the forests in America and those in Normandy. Where I grew up, wood was precious, and farmers picked up every last branch like they would pick up stray nails. In forests in America, tree trunks just rot where they fall. No one uses them.” (Fernand Léger: The Later Years, exh. cat., Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 1987, p. 52).
These themes of preservation and abandonment are present in Une figure dans un paysage, with its composition of seemingly unrelated objects, which include chains, photographs, and branches. They evoke the artistic practices of found objects and photomontage, in which artists brought together objects often thought of as disposable and commonplace. Léger however chooses to juxtapose these objects through the medium of oil painting—one heavily associated with fine art and cultural heritage. The themes of preservation and abandonment are further explored through Léger’s inclusion of a photograph—which, rather uniquely for the artist, is a self-portrait. Léger chooses to simultaneously depict himself in the new, modern but ‘disposable’ medium of photography and the traditional medium of oil painting, one associated with cultural preservation.
The bright, saturated colors in the painting evoke Léger’s impressions of the desert expanses of the American West, which he had explored during his years in the United States. “One of my favorite memories of my visit was my drive from Texas to Arizona. Travelling through that furnace, we shouted and screamed in front of an epic parade of giant cacti, rocks, sand and oil wells.” (C. Lancher, Fernand Léger: American Connections, exh. cat. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1998, p. 53). These impressions of an alien landscape would inform his paintings of the post-war period, when he created canvases depicting landscapes of the impossible, as is the case in the present work. These would later reach an apogee in his monumental paintings of the 1950s, including one of the most important works in his oeuvre, the final version of La Grande Parade, 1954, which now hangs in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.