Fernand Léger

Mr. and Mrs. George Bauquier, Biot, France
Private Collection, New York
Acquired from the above in 1998

Executed on thick cream wove paper laid down on Japan paper, hinged to a mat on the verso at the top corners. Two one-inch repaired tears on either side of a diagonal 5-inch repaired tear at the center of the bottom of the edge. Some surface dirt. Otherwise fine, work is in good condition.
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Léger first embarked on the theme of construction workers in 1940, and in the following decade produced a number of paintings, drawings and sketches on this subject, culminating in such monumental oils as Les Constructeurs of 1951 (see fig. 1), now in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow. This subject particularly preoccupied Léger in 1950 and 1951, when it became the primary focus of his work. Never before in his career had Léger expressed such interest in the human body, and his series of construction workers, including numerous studies of body parts, indicates a direction towards its "humanization."

Léger himself gave an account of how he arrived at this subject: "I got the idea travelling to Chevreuse by road every evening. A factory was under construction in the field there. I saw the men swaying high up on the steel girders! I saw man like a flea; he seemed still lost in his inventions with the sky above him. I wanted to render that; the contrast between man and his inventions, between the worker and all that metal architecture, that hardness, that ironwork, those bolts and rivets. The clouds, too, I arranged technically, but they form a contrast with the girders" (quoted in Werner Schmalenbach, Fernand Léger, New York, 1976, p. 158).

Fig. 1 Fernand Léger, Les Constructeurs, 1951, oil on canvas, Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow