Lot Essay
In 1949 Père Couturier, a Dominican teacher and artist, commissioned Léger, Braque, Matisse, Chagall, Lipchitz and others to assist in the decoration of the new church of Assy in the South of France. Léger produced a mosaic for the church, which was consecrated in 1950 to mixed reactions and much controversy. It was in Biot in the atelier of his former pupil Roland Brice that Léger began to experiment with decorative ceramic, animating walls with colour and his familiar visual vocabulary. In the 1950s architectural commissions became more and more frequent and Léger worked on, amongst other projects, the crypt of the American Memorial in Bastogne in Belgium, the church of Courfaivre in Switzerland, the United Nations building, the University of Caracas and the hospital in Saint-Lô. Inspired by a composition that first appears in Léger's oeuvre in 1951 (B. 1417) and directly based on a 1952 oil of the same title, the present mosaic decorated one of the walls of the artist's house near Lisores, which he had inherited from his mother in 1922.