.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
‘I made the objects in space so as to be sure of my objects. I sensed that I could not put my object on a table without diminishing its value as an object’ (Léger, quoted in C. Lanchner, Fernand Léger, exh.cat., New York, 1998, p. 206).
Fernand Léger's Composition sur fond bleu was painted in 1929 and captures the atmosphere of that heady historical moment, with its peak of decadence and its all-too-vivid Great Crash. Its lyrical, Art Deco stylings, jazz-like configuration of motifs around the canvas capture both the aesthetics of its era and Léger's clear enjoyment of his own liberation from the constraints of the architectonic style that had formerly characterized so many of his works. Influenced in part by contemporary music and in part by the Surreal movement which had involved so many of his friends and fellow artists during the same period, Léger abandoned the rigid verticals and horizontals of his works from the years just previous, introducing instead the sinewy forms that dance across and indeed burst from the canvas here.
Following his series of monumental still lifes painted in 1926-27, with their sculpted torsos, columns and ordinary objects like a bottle or a feather juxtaposed with an umbrella, a compass or a musical instrument, the work Fernand Léger produced between 1928 and 1930 shows his visual vocabulary turning towards a New Realism. Freeing himself from the constraints and architectonic style that had characterised his work until then, he also moved away from the Renaissance-era notion that an artist should address the subject; on the contrary, he focused on the object and its purely aesthetic value. From then on, Léger employed the still life not as many Surrealists did, for the weight of symbolism it conveys, but for the plastic quality of the object depicted. Herein lies the artist’s modernity. As this work illustrates, the objects in his still lifes take on an existence of their own, without necessarily bearing any relation to each other. Veering away from all notions of narrative, the object is considered as an absolute, with an intrinsic dramatic power of its own. With the subject and the idea of narrative undermined in this way, the composition becomes boundlessly free. Objects – isolated fragments in space, completely weightless – become a manifestation of the painter's cinematic thinking.
In Léger’s view, this reappropriation of the object stems from filmmaking, with its close-up shots and the fragmentation of movement it allows. By endowing an object with a life of its own – and thereby investing it with the emotional impact of a leading protagonist – filmmakers also provide Léger with a fundamental theme that he expresses in this composition. The abstract zone around the spinning tops and what appears to be a record player has the effect of highlighting them by further isolating them. In as much as the spinning top represents an object quintessentially in motion, it harbours its own visual interest; just as it sustains its own movement, spinning autonomously on its own axis. The record player echoes this same circular movement, referencing Léger's musical influences while also strongly symbolising modernity. A simple child's toy, the spinning-top, was rendered and included as one of the objects in five paintings done in 1929: the present work, and Bauquier nos. 629, 670, 636 and 637.
Last appeared on the market in 1987, Composition sur fond bleu has been cherished in the same private collection for over thirty years. As attested by the inscription on the reverse, it serves as the first state of the 1930 painting in the collection of the Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, titled Composition sur fond bleu, and recorded as no. 706 in the Fernand Léger Catalogue Raisonné by Georges Bauquier (Paris, 1995).
Fernand Léger's Composition sur fond bleu was painted in 1929 and captures the atmosphere of that heady historical moment, with its peak of decadence and its all-too-vivid Great Crash. Its lyrical, Art Deco stylings, jazz-like configuration of motifs around the canvas capture both the aesthetics of its era and Léger's clear enjoyment of his own liberation from the constraints of the architectonic style that had formerly characterized so many of his works. Influenced in part by contemporary music and in part by the Surreal movement which had involved so many of his friends and fellow artists during the same period, Léger abandoned the rigid verticals and horizontals of his works from the years just previous, introducing instead the sinewy forms that dance across and indeed burst from the canvas here.
Following his series of monumental still lifes painted in 1926-27, with their sculpted torsos, columns and ordinary objects like a bottle or a feather juxtaposed with an umbrella, a compass or a musical instrument, the work Fernand Léger produced between 1928 and 1930 shows his visual vocabulary turning towards a New Realism. Freeing himself from the constraints and architectonic style that had characterised his work until then, he also moved away from the Renaissance-era notion that an artist should address the subject; on the contrary, he focused on the object and its purely aesthetic value. From then on, Léger employed the still life not as many Surrealists did, for the weight of symbolism it conveys, but for the plastic quality of the object depicted. Herein lies the artist’s modernity. As this work illustrates, the objects in his still lifes take on an existence of their own, without necessarily bearing any relation to each other. Veering away from all notions of narrative, the object is considered as an absolute, with an intrinsic dramatic power of its own. With the subject and the idea of narrative undermined in this way, the composition becomes boundlessly free. Objects – isolated fragments in space, completely weightless – become a manifestation of the painter's cinematic thinking.
In Léger’s view, this reappropriation of the object stems from filmmaking, with its close-up shots and the fragmentation of movement it allows. By endowing an object with a life of its own – and thereby investing it with the emotional impact of a leading protagonist – filmmakers also provide Léger with a fundamental theme that he expresses in this composition. The abstract zone around the spinning tops and what appears to be a record player has the effect of highlighting them by further isolating them. In as much as the spinning top represents an object quintessentially in motion, it harbours its own visual interest; just as it sustains its own movement, spinning autonomously on its own axis. The record player echoes this same circular movement, referencing Léger's musical influences while also strongly symbolising modernity. A simple child's toy, the spinning-top, was rendered and included as one of the objects in five paintings done in 1929: the present work, and Bauquier nos. 629, 670, 636 and 637.
Last appeared on the market in 1987, Composition sur fond bleu has been cherished in the same private collection for over thirty years. As attested by the inscription on the reverse, it serves as the first state of the 1930 painting in the collection of the Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, titled Composition sur fond bleu, and recorded as no. 706 in the Fernand Léger Catalogue Raisonné by Georges Bauquier (Paris, 1995).