.jpg?w=1)
拍品专文
Vase devant une fenêtre is a still life drawing by Fernand Léger that perfectly encapsulates both his concepts and the style of the age. There is an undeniable Art Deco feel to this composition, with its stylised vase and the landscape in the background. Léger has playfully included a landscape picture within this composition, adding an intriguing visual assonance, allowing him to explore the lush curves of the hills of the landscape in miniature. These curves, though, retain a near-geometrical firmness and regularity. Léger has managed to conjure the organic forms of the landscape through a visual language that speaks with the idiom of manufacture and technology that defined the modern era and which he managed to celebrate in his pictures. While the subject matter of this picture, the guéridon in front of the window, can be seen as a response to the Cubist still life pictures of the previous decade, and indeed to the works that Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque were creating in the post-Cubist 1920s, Léger has managed to introduce a sense of solidity and rationality as well as the lyricism that defined their compositions.
Vase devant une fenêtre appears to have been painted in the early 1920s, perhaps around 1923. Certainly he was creating dated still life works paintings at that time that relate stylistically to Vase devant une fenêtre. This picture demonstrates the play of contrasts that concerned Léger during the period, reflecting his interest in Purism and De Stijl alike with its use of geometry and rhythm while avoiding any slavish adherence to either. Léger himself, in 1923, would explain the techniques that underpinned his compositions:
'I organise the opposition of contrasting values, lines, and curves. I oppose curves to straight lines, flat surfaces to moulded forms, pure local colours to nuances of grey. These initial plastic forms are either superimposed on objective elements or not, it makes no difference to me. There is only a question of variety' (F. Léger, Functions of Painting, ed. E.F. Fry, London, 1973, p. 25).
At the time that Vase devant une fenêtre was executed, Léger was looking at the world with increasingly fresh perspective. He was able to see the beauty of the everyday objects that were around him, a beauty that could often be eked out by presenting them in novel ways. This notion was to reach its zenith in the film that Léger created between 1923 and 1924, his Ballet Mécanique, which contained shots of various subjects shown in a way that was at once absurd and, in a hallucinatory way, beautiful. Vase devant une fenêtre is a microcosm of this same process: a picture of a vase against a wall with a landscape in the background, a mundane scene that is lent a revelatory quality through the use of the crisp lines and curves of which it is composed. Thus the language of engineering, of modernity, has been used to pay homage to the beauty seen in corners of the everyday world.
Vase devant une fenêtre appears to have been painted in the early 1920s, perhaps around 1923. Certainly he was creating dated still life works paintings at that time that relate stylistically to Vase devant une fenêtre. This picture demonstrates the play of contrasts that concerned Léger during the period, reflecting his interest in Purism and De Stijl alike with its use of geometry and rhythm while avoiding any slavish adherence to either. Léger himself, in 1923, would explain the techniques that underpinned his compositions:
'I organise the opposition of contrasting values, lines, and curves. I oppose curves to straight lines, flat surfaces to moulded forms, pure local colours to nuances of grey. These initial plastic forms are either superimposed on objective elements or not, it makes no difference to me. There is only a question of variety' (F. Léger, Functions of Painting, ed. E.F. Fry, London, 1973, p. 25).
At the time that Vase devant une fenêtre was executed, Léger was looking at the world with increasingly fresh perspective. He was able to see the beauty of the everyday objects that were around him, a beauty that could often be eked out by presenting them in novel ways. This notion was to reach its zenith in the film that Léger created between 1923 and 1924, his Ballet Mécanique, which contained shots of various subjects shown in a way that was at once absurd and, in a hallucinatory way, beautiful. Vase devant une fenêtre is a microcosm of this same process: a picture of a vase against a wall with a landscape in the background, a mundane scene that is lent a revelatory quality through the use of the crisp lines and curves of which it is composed. Thus the language of engineering, of modernity, has been used to pay homage to the beauty seen in corners of the everyday world.