Fernand Léger

Private Collection
Private Collection, Monaco
Sale: Drouot-Montaigne, Paris, 5th June 1989, lot 43
Sale: Artcurial, Paris, 29th October 2006, lot 155
Purchased at the above sale by the present owner

Georges Bauquier, Fernand Léger Catalogue Raisonné 1925-1928, Paris, 1993, no. 546, illustrated in colour p. 267

The canvas is not lined and the verso is extrensively inscribed by Georges Bauquier. UV examination reveals a few intermittent spots of retouching to all four extreme edges and a further few spots of retouching to the rightmost orange element. There is some stable paint shrinkage within the black vase and some fine lines of craquelure in places, mainly to the left of the green element. Otherwise this work is in very good condition.
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Painted in 1928, Nature morte au profil is a wonderful example of the great aesthetic and theoretical transition that occurred in Léger’s œuvrein the late 1920s and early 1930s. It marks the artist’s move away from the rigid, mechanical vocabulary that characterised his earlier work and his embrace of a more organic, less narrative aesthetic. Francis Bacon used to describe his process of artistic creation as a tightrope walk between figuration and abstraction, an attestation that might just as well be used to articulate the similar challenges Léger was grappling with in this period. The stylised figures of old have here been reduced to their most essential forms: the solid black silhouette of the black profile finds its contrast with the graceful, dotted filaments, whose freeform dance across the canvas marks a major departure from the rigid geometric framing devices that encased most of his earlier compositions.

Léger’s main epiphany during this period was that he needed to liberate painting from any subject or narrative: ‘The subject in painting has already been destroyed, just as avant-garde film destroyed the storyline’ (Leger, quoted in Jean Cassou & Jean Leymarie, Fernand Léger: Drawings and Gouaches, New York, 1973, p. 87). He realised that he needed to unshackle the object from its setting, to extract it from its conventional context and relationships, and let it exist for its own sake in a new isolated, revitalised state. ‘In painting, the strongest restraint has been that of subject matter upon composition, imposed by the Italian Renaissance. The effort towards freedom began with the Impressionists and has continued to express itself until our day […] the feeling for the object is already in primitive pictures – in works of the high periods of Egyptian, Assyrian, Greek, Roman and Gothic art. The moderns are going to develop it, isolate it, and extract every possible result of it’ (Fernand Léger, ‘The New Realism’, in E.F. Fry (ed.), Fernand Léger: Functions of Painting, New York, 1973, p. 109). 

A key theoretical component of Léger’s New Realism was the concept of ‘the object in space’, perfectly exemplified in the present work. Nature morte au profil invites us into an indeterminate and ambiguous space, a place devoid of any historical or cultural references, and where time appears to have been suspended. It is by focussing on this context – or lack of, rather – that we begin to understand Léger’s contribution to what is widely acknowledged as the  most important and influential artistic breakthrough of the early twentieth century, that of re-contextualising familiar imagery in an effort to challenge, or at least revitalise, our common perceptions and interpretations. Léger has here freed form from the static structures that had previously held their contents in place, thereby imbuing his new works with a newfound atmosphere of fluctuation and fluidity, echoed by the organic imagery of leaves, shoots and roots that wind their way in amongst the more solid elements. This new floating context breathes new life into the strange assemblage of forms and colours, and lends the composition an enduring ambience of mystery and flux. As Léger himself explained: ‘I placed objects in space so that I could take them as a certainty. I felt that I could not take them as a certainty. I could not place an object on a table without diminishing its value […] I selected an object, chucked the table away. I put the object in space, minus perspective. Minus anything to hold it there. I then had to liberate colour to an even greater extent’ (quoted in Peter de Francia, Fernand Léger, New Haven, 1983, p. 111). Jean Leymarie has remarked upon the way that in these transitional works ‘Léger’s objects have escaped from the domination of the subject as they have from the pull of gravity; they invert or reject perspective, loom up and recede in the air, with the power and mystery of pictures in slow motion. This decisive change, the abrupt turning from a static, frontal, solemn order to a fluid and playful freedom, corresponds to the painter’s internal dialectic’ (Jean Cassou & Jean Leymarie, Fernand Léger: Drawings and Gouaches, New York, 1973, p. 87). Léger describes the artistic process for these new liberated compositions in terms of a game or ‘un jeu pas facile’, and he is not the first artist to use the game analogy to articulate the genesis of a painting, evoking as it does the push-pull relationship between chance and the artist’s choice. It is this ambiguity – this not knowing to what extent the composition and each object’s placement is predetermined – that gives paintings of this period such as Nature morte au profil their distinctive energy and impact.

This compositional freedom was echoed by a freedom in his palette. The vibrant oranges, yellows and greens of the present work are set off by the more pared down elegance of the uniform grey and black, as well as the luminous use of white. The resulting aesthetic is one of startling modernity, where colour and form interact in a way completely free from narrative. There is a musicality to the way the forms engage with each other, an overarching feeling of rhythm and gentle sense of expansion and retraction. In contrast to the industrial subjects that characterised Léger’s earlier works, these new works reflect an interest in the gentle fluctuation of the natural world: ‘I dispersed my objects in space, and kept them altogether while at the same time making them radiate out from the surface of the picture. Tricky interplay of harmonies and rhythms made up of background and surface colours, guidelines, distances and oppositions’, (Léger, quoted in Werner Schmalenbach, Fernand Léger, New York, 1976, p. 132).

The shifting and irrational sense of space that dominates the work is further exemplified by the way in which the profile on the right-hand side of the composition appears to have become separated from the leftmost black element. Is it the back part of a figure’s head or a vase? Is this a cleaved head wedged apart by the flowing forms that evoke the human subconscious? Surely the symbolism of the over-sized key, positioned amongst a stream of seemingly random free-flowing elements, between two halves of a head represents a nod to the widespread influence of Sigmund Freud’s theories of psychoanalysis at the time? Though Léger certainly did not consider himself a Surrealist, and we are oft-warned against imposing such superficial interpretations, there is no doubt that Léger was well acquainted with the concerns of his Surrealist contemporaries around him, and that the present work - executed in the formative years of the Parisian Surrealism - acknowledges some of the movement’s most central themes. In fact, the longer one looks at Nature morte au profil , the more valid a Surrealist interpretation appears to be for this particular work. The painting is laden with imagery evocative of analysis and discovery: the aforementioned key positioned where the brain would normally lie, the dotted lines (are they pathways or dissection lines?), the roots coming down from the leaves, not to mention the arrows that shoot horizontally across the composition. Though the symbolism of this imagery undoubtedly nods to the subconscious, Peter de Francia insists that ‘subject matter in Léger’s case is never invested with transcendental meaning' (P. de Francia, Fernand Léger, New Haven, 1983, p. 114) , a position echoed by Jean Leymarie’s assertion that ‘Léger’s reactions were stimulated only by plastic requirements, by the laws of rhythm and contrast’ (Jean Cassou & Jean Leymarie, Fernand Léger: Drawings and Gouaches, New York, 1973, p. 101). Indeed, a key principle of Léger’s New Realism was the understanding that ‘everything is of equal interest, that the human face or the human body is of no weightier plastic than a tree, a plant, or a pile of rope’ (Fernand Léger, ‘The New Realism’, in E.F. Fry (ed.), Fernand Léger: Functions of Painting, New York, 1973, p. 109).