Impressionist and Modern Art Day Sale

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Lot 171
  • 171

Fernand Léger

Estimate
150,000 - 200,000 USD
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Description

  • Fernand Léger
  • Femme nue assise
  • Signed and dated FL 12 (lower right) 
  • Charcoal on paper
  • 25 3/4 by 19 3/4 in.
  • 65.4 by 50.2 cm

Provenance

Marie Cuttoli, Paris
Galerie Claude Bernard, Paris
Galerie Beyeler, Basel
Thomas Gibson Fine Art, London

Exhibited

Musée Cantini, Marseilles, n.d.

Literature

Jean Cassou and Jean Leymarie, Fernand Léger, Drawings and Gouaches, Greenwich, 1973, no. 16. illustrated p. 29

Catalogue Note

Early in Léger's career Cubism became the dominant style of the avant-garde and greatly influenced the painter.  Fragmentation of subject and a mobile perspective characterized his work of that time.

Léger's move toward abstraction coincided with the publication in French on April 11, 1910 of the Futurist Manifesto.  Its advocacy of painting "dynamic sensation" and the notion that "everything is in flux" related to Léger's painting.  However, its move away from traditional subject matter was antithetical to the artist.  In his painting and drawing he continued focusing on the figure, though minimally relating it to visual reality.  In Femme nue assise, Léger successfully integrates abstract forms with one of the most oft represented and traditional subjects in art, the female nude.

Fig. 1 Fernand Léger, Modèle nu dans l'atelier, 1912-1913, oil on canvas, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum