Fernand Léger

Private Collection

Galerie Louis Carré, Paris (1949)

Galerie Louise Leiris, Paris

Galerie Beyeler, Basel

Acquired from the above on February 13, 1974

Paris, Musée National d’Art Moderne, Léger, 1949, no. 30

Basel, Kunsthalle; Zürich, Kunsthaus, Léger, 1957, no. 19

Rome, Palazzo Barberini, Omaggio ad Apollinaire, 1960-61

Düsseldorf, Staatliche Kunsthalle; Basel, Galerie Beyeler, Léger, 1969-70, no. 21 (no. 14 in Basel)

Peter de Francia, Fernand Léger, New Haven and London, 1983, discussed p. 45

Georges Bauquier, Fernand Léger, Catalogue raisonné, 1903-1919, Paris, 1990, no. 143, illustrated p. 257

The feverish formal construction and linear motion of Léger's powerful La Gare exalts the speed and progress of the modern age.    This composition of 1918 is from the same series as Les Usines, and its subject touches on a theme that had long been popular with painters of modern life.  Beginning with the Impressionists' images of the Gare St.-Lazare (see fig. 1) and continuing with the Italian Futurists during World War I (see fig. 2), depictions of trains and train stations codified the notion of modern life in transit.  No other urban setting was filled with more activity than the railway station, and Léger has set out here to capture the bustle, efficiency and motion of this typically modern spectacle (see fig. 3). 

By the time that Léger painted this work, he had already mastered a type of formal abstraction that had taken hold of the salons of Paris.  This style, known as Synthetic Cubism, was rooted in abstraction and had come to represent the essence of modernity in the years before the war.  But nearly a decade later, Léger felt that the abstraction of Cubism alone was not a sufficient means to represent the environment in which he lived.  In post-war Paris he was overwhelmed by the constant motion of the city – the automobiles, street cars, motorcycles, and, most impressively, the trains that sped along their steel rails at unprecedented speeds. Léger once wrote about his impressions of the city and described the distinct sense of motion of objects even at rest:  "Every day, one can see the way lines behave in relation to the manner in which industrial machines are made.  A car or a locomotive, both dominated by horizontal lines, convey an impression of speed, even when they are not moving" (Peter de Francia, op. cit., p. 47).

Léger sought to capture this sense of speed and energy in his paintings, and for many of his compositions from 1918, he chose to depict the rotating 'discs' of the urban landscape (see fig. 4).  In La Gare, he is able to capture all of the elements that were emblematic of the urban experience.  Léger has incorporated the very essence of the station – from the stenciled lettering  of the station's sign posts, to perforated sheets of metal, to the movement of pistons against the wheels of the train – in one brilliant pictorial amalgamation.

Writing about this picture in his monograph on the artist, Peter de Francia has noted:  "Léger's 1918 pictures are highly compressed compositions, densely packed and heavily articulated.  Paintings such as La Gare, containing elements  based on railway signals, used muted, sometimes slightly muddied colours.  The signals, made of sheet metal often perforated with circles, formed part of the familiar panorama crowding the tracks leading from main-line stations and were important to Léger because they were also incongruous intruders into rural and urban landscapes." (ibid., p. 45).

Fig. 1, Claude Monet, La Gare Saint-Lazare, 1877, oil on canvas, Musée d'Orsay, Paris

Fig. 2, Gino Severini, Il treno nella cittá, 1915, charcoal on paper, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Fig. 3, Film still from Abel Gance's La Roue, 1922

Fig. 4, Fernand Léger, Les Disques rouges, 1918, oil on canvas, sold: Sotheby’s, New York, November 4, 2004