Fernand Léger

Sergei Romoff, Paris (a gift from the artist)
Berggruen & Cie., Paris
Sale: Christie's, New York, 17th May 1984, lot 132
Alexandre Iolas, Paris (purchased at the above sale)
Acquired from the above by the present owner

Executed on white wove paper, not laid down, attached to the mount on the reverse of the top two corners. There is some mild discolouration to the sheet and some spots of foxing visible on the reverse. There is some mount staining along the edges (not visible when mounted). Apart from some small losses to the white gouache in the oval shape above centre, this work is in good condition. Colours: In comparison to the printed catalogue illustration, the sheet has a cleaner tonality. The reds have a more orange tonality and the blue is slightly brighter in the original.
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NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

Executed in 1926, this composition reflects the importance of architecture as an aesthetic influence in Léger's painting in the years after the First World War, and his association with the Purist artists Amédée Ozenfant and Charles-Edouard Jeanneret (Le Corbusier). Le Corbusier, who was better known as an architect than as a painter, was a leading proponent of mathematical precision and the solidity of form in art. Léger was initially drawn to the general principles of Purism but ultimately found them too rigid for his painting. In the present work, however, Léger focused on the clarity and solid geometry of his objects, adhering to the primary concerns of the Purist objective. 

Writing about Léger's works from 1924-27, Christopher Green commented: 'They are the product of a pictorial idea of the figure or object whose brutal "plastic" simplicity is personal, but which is the product of an approach to the realities of modern life indelibly tinged with the idealism of L'Esprit Nouveau, an approach which remains stubbornly "realist" but whose highly selective vision of the world picks out the most useful, the most geometrically "pure", the most precisely finished of its manufactures, and subjects even the nude or the figurative fragment to the mass-production yet "classical" values thus extracted. And in their grand, harmonious architecture with its clear articulation of spatial incident, these paintings are at the same time the product of an international avant-garde [...] Their assurance and the conviction they carry is founded on more than fifteen years of faith in what was then most modern about the industrial world, of openness to what was most new in the avant-garde and of experiment in book illustration, theatre and film as well as in painting' (C. Green, Léger and the Avant-Garde, New Haven & London, 1976, p. 310).

 

Léger dedicated this work to Sergei Romoff (1883-1939), a Russian émigré literary critic, translator, avant-garde art and literature historian. Romoff was a member of the Union des Artistes Russes, a Paris-based society that brought together a number of Russuan émigré artists and critics, including Sonia Delaunay, Viktor Bart and Léopold Survage. In February 1923, the Union des Artistes Russes, headed by a committee that included Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov, organised the costume ball 'Grand Bal des Artistes'. They asked a number of French colleagues, including Léger, Picasso, Gris and Gleizes to contribute to the design and marketing of the event, and Léger designed costumes and a theatre box.