Eléments mécaniques

The machine—both as subject and stylistic idiom—had erupted into Fernand Léger’s work in 1918. The artist had spent the previous four years serving on the front line in the French army. There, he was overwhelmed by the new technological and industrial modes of warfare employed by both sides of the conflict. He was fascinated by the complex structures of aircraft engines, the monstrous forms of tanks, and gleaming barrels of machine guns. Amid this destruction, Léger realized that the rapid industrialization that had taken place in these opening decades of the twentieth century would ensure that the post-war era would be a mechanical world. As a result, Léger returned to painting with a radically new artistic outlook. He left behind the non-representational abstraction of his pre-war Contrastes de formes and embraced modern life in his art, deifying the machine and reintroducing subject-matter in his art. He developed a new “mechanized” artistic language, which he believed perfectly distilled the technology, modernity and dynamism of the new post-war era into painterly form.
Eléments mécaniques exemplifies Léger’s “mechanical period.” Here, the artist has moved beyond the depiction of specific objects—a factory, train, or the modern city itself—to arrive at a near abstract construction of geometric forms and flattened planes of color. Interlocking together, these mechanical elements exist within the composition in perfect accord. “I have never enjoyed copying a machine,” the artist stated, “I invent images from machines, as others have made landscapes from their imagination. For me, the mechanical element is not a fixed position, an attitude, but a means of succeeding in conveying a feeling of strength and power… It is necessary to retain what is useful in the subject and to extract from it the best possible part. I try to create a beautiful object with mechanical elements” (“The Machine Aesthetic: Geometric Order and Truth,” in E.F. Fry, ed., Functions of Painting: Fernand Léger, London, 1973, p. 62).
By 1922, the year he painted Eléments mécaniques, Léger had begun to consider his art in relation to the prevailing aesthetic tendency, the rappel à l'ordre. This ideological movement was conceived in reaction to the destruction and horror that the First World War had wrought. The “Call to Order” heralded a renewed and overt embrace of classical subjects and styles. Stability, harmony, rationality and discipline were the aesthetic ideals of this concept, which artists interpreted and incorporated into their art in myriad ways.
For Léger, the “Call to Order” did not immediately prompt a new direction in his art. Yet, the overriding sentiments made their way into his painting, particularly from 1920 onwards. Not only did he start to focus upon traditional subjects such as the nude and the landscape, but he also began to introduce a greater compositional balance and harmony into his compositions. While he remained true to his basic underlying principle of exploiting contrasts of form, he now did this with a different aim: to create an overriding sense of unity and order in his compositions. As Christopher Green has explained, “when Léger initiated his ‘call to order’ in 1920, it was not towards a sustained unification of style that he moved, but rather towards a simpler, more coordinated presentation of stylistic contradictions, in which a more unified and more clear-cut planar architecture provided the setting for a more unified and more clear-cut presentation of the machine-man figure” (quoted in C. Green, Léger and the Avant-Garde, New Haven, 1976, p. 197).
This gradual shift can be seen in Eléments mécaniques. While composed of the geometric, machine-like forms of his earlier works, there is a sense of structural balance and rhythmic repetition underlying the tight formation of multipartite planes. With a carefully reduced palette of grays, whites and blacks, interspersed with dazzling primary tones, works such as Eléments mécaniques have a distinctly Minimalist aesthetic, as the artist increasingly looked to unify and purify his previously cacophonous compositions.
Eléments mécaniques appealed to the co-protagonist of Purism, Amédée Ozenfant, who acquired it circa 1922-1925. Léger was close to both Ozenfant and his purist collaborator, Charles-Édouard Jeanneret (later, Le Corbusier) in the early 1920s, their interests aligning for a short period of time. The painting was held in a number of other important collections over the course of the twentieth century. From Ozenfant, it passed to Coca-Cola executive, Stanley N. Barbee, who acquired an impressive art collection including Pablo Picasso’s Profil (Sold Christie’s, New York, 11 November 2021), as well as paintings by Paul Cezanne and others. It was subsequently owned by fashion designer, Larry Aldrich, in whose collection it remained alongside works by a variety of artists from Edouard Manet, and Paul Gauguin, to Alberto Giacometti, Ellsworth Kelly, and Bridget Riley among many others. In 1963, Aldrich sold works from his collection that dated from before 1950, including Eléments mécaniques.
The painting was acquired from Aldrich’s sale by Frederick Weisman. Together with his wife, Marcia Simon, sister of the collector, Norton Simon, the Weismans amassed an extensive collection of twentieth-century works, becoming leading arbiters of contemporary art in Los Angeles. David Hockney painted the couple in the garden of their home in the 1968 double portrait, American Collectors (Fred and Marcia Weisman). Latterly they each founded institutions in California to house their collections. Sold by the Weismans in 1965, Eléments mécaniques was later acquired by the American stage and screen actor, Tony Randall. It was bought by the present owner in 2007, and has remained in their collection ever since.