Fernand Léger

Richard Davis, New York

Parke Bernet, New York, 13 April 1944, lot 45 (consigned by the above)

George Heard Hamilton and Polly Hamilton, New Haven and Williamstown (acquired at the above sale and until at least 1965)

Richard L. Feigen, New York and Chicago

Heinz Berggruen, New York and Paris

Daniel Malingue, Paris (acquired by 1980)

Folker Skulima, New York

Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1982

New York, Galerie Chalette, Fernand Léger, The Figure, 1965, no. 9, n.p., illustrated

Paris, Galerie Daniel Malingue, Maîtres impressionnistes et modernes, 1980, no. 22, n.p., illustrated in color

ArtNews, vol. 55, no. 3, May 1956, illustrated

Apollo, vol. CXII, no. 223, September 1980, illustrated

Georges Bauquier, Fernand Léger. Catalogue raisonné de l’œuvre peint, 1920-1924, vol. II, Paris, 1992, no. 387, p. 327, illustrated in color

Fernand Léger’s striking Paysage animé forms part of a remarkable group of oils and related drawings depicting the artist alongside his dealer Léonce Rosenberg during their trip to Italy in August 1924. Emerging from what is widely considered the artist’s most creative and experimental decade, the present work is exemplary of the vital period during which Léger, having absorbed a range of contemporary avant-garde influences, developed his unique, unclassifiable style, emerging as the preeminent painter of modern metropolitan life.

Having spent four years in the military during the First World War, first as a sapper and later as a stretcher-bearer, Léger was eventually discharged in June 1918. In the years that immediately followed, Léger concentrated on depicting the dynamic energy of the modern city and the accelerating mechanization of everyday life—subjects he had begun exploring before the conflict but was unable to develop further during the war due to his active military service. The artist’s longing for the modern city life comes through vividly in one of his letters home dating to April 1915: “How I'll gobble Paris up […] if I'm lucky enough to go back there! I'll fill my pockets with it, and my eyes. I'll walk about in it like l've never before walked about there" (artist quoted in Exh. Cat., Philadelphia Museum of Art and Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia, Museo Correr, Léger: Modern Art and the Metropolis, 2014, p. 2). His fascination with life in the twentieth-century metropolis, its exuberant yet overwhelming nature, found its powerful expression in what is arguably one of his most famous works, La Ville of 1919 (see fig. 1).

Several distinct elements make La Ville one of Léger’s most groundbreaking oils from this decisive period. These include its multi-planar, focus-defying composition—rooted in the artist’s pre-war Cubist legacy—and his use of rhythmic blocks of color that seem to dance across a multitude of geometric forms, forms that evoke elements of a distinctly modern urban landscape: buildings, windows, advertising billboards, bridges, staircases, and electric wires. Additionally, the deliberate lack of linear perspective and the abrupt cropping invite comparisons to a rolling film reel or a dynamic stage set about to shift into its next scene.

Although created several years later, nearly all of these compositional and formal elements reappear, albeit on a smaller scale, in Paysage animé, reflecting Léger’s enduring fascination with the city and its dynamism. By 1924, however, his style had evolved significantly. The present work vividly reflects his exposure to—and synthesis of—diverse artistic movements which took center stage within the Western artistic milieu in the immediate post-war years. These include Neo-Classicism and the "return to order," as well as Purism and De Stijl, echoes of which all reverberate, to varying degrees, within the present composition.

The post-war cultural rappel à l’ordre (“return to order”) saw many leading avant-garde artists, among them Picasso, Gris and Matisse, step away from radical formal experimentation to embrace elements of classical tradition, figural representation and compositional stability in their work. Léger’s depiction of the two figures in Paysage animé—particularly when compared to the distinctly more abstract and fragmented way in which humans are rendered in La Ville—can be seen as part of this wider shift towards a more naturalistic, yet stylized, representation of the human figure that many artists adopted during that period.

Yet, it was Purism, a branch of the “return to order” movement conceptualized by Amedée Ozenfant and Charles-Edouard Jeanneret (later known as Le Corbusier), which can be said to have appealed most closely to Léger. Ozenfant and Jeanneret’s groundbreaking 1918 publication Après le Cubisme outlined the tenets of Purism. It declared the end of Cubism—which in their view had become too decorative—and heralded the arrival of a new dynamic style in its place which emphasized rationality, logic and refinement as its central pillars. A critical element of Purism—and one which Léger would have felt particularly attuned to—was its embrace of technology and the machine, their works set to imbue the mechanical and industrial themes with a timeless, classical quality (see fig. 3).

Having met both Ozenfant and Le Corbusier around 1920, in 1924 Léger would go on to open an art academy and studio in Paris with Ozenfant—a clear indication of his profound affiliation with Purist ideas. In Paysage animé, several aspects demonstrate Léger’s integration of Purist principles, notably his use of geometric shapes that delineate the walls, windows, chimneys, and staircase rails surrounding the two figures. These pure, idealized forms seem to balance in a delicate but steady equilibrium on the surface of the canvas, embodying the Purist commitment to order and harmony.

Yet, as Christopher Green explains, Léger did not adhere strictly to any particular aspect of the “return to order” movement: “[…] when Léger initiated his ‘call to order’ […] it was not towards a sustained unification of style that he moved, but rather towards a simpler, more coordinated presentation of stylistic contradictions, in which a more unified and more clear-cut planar architecture provided the setting for a more unified and more clear-cut presentation of the machine-man figure. An end to ambiguity was allied to conspicuous structural stability” (Christopher Green, Léger and the Avant-Garde, London, 1976, p. 197).

When it came to Purism, it was not only Léger’s pronounced focus on the figure of a man within the modern city that set him apar—with Purists focused on still life as a predominant area of formal exploration—but also his increasing use of brighter colors during this period. This shift evokes the influence of De Stijl artists such as Piet Mondrian, whose paintings, characterized by abstract geometric shapes rendered in primary hues, were featured in a 1921 exhibition at Léger’s dealer Léonce Rosenberg’s Galerie L’Effort Moderne – an exhibition the artist would have almost certainly seen in person (see fig. 4).

At the same time, the dynamic, multi-planar perspective Léger employs in Paysage animé – together with the stage-like arrangement of the two figures—conjure up associations with theatre set designs. These compositional elements reflect Léger’s notable work in this field during the 1920s, including with the Swedish Ballets (Ballets suédois), a Paris-based avant-garde dance company led by Rolf de Maré, and his broader awareness of the developments in avant-garde theatre design taking place elsewhere in Europe and beyond during that time (see fig. 5).

What further sets the present work apart is its uniquely autobiographical nature, with very few works in Léger’s œuvre connected to specific events in his life. According to the publication featuring the correspondence between the artist and his dealer Léonce Rosenberg—who began representing Léger exclusively in 1919—the two embarked on their Italian “cultural escapade” in August 1924, visiting Venice, Sienna, Florence, Ravenna and Rome (Christian Derouet, ed., Correspondances, Fernand Léger, Léonce Rosenberg, 1917-1937, Paris and New York, 1996, pp. 138 and 146-47).

A postcard Rosenberg sent to Gino Severini in early August notes that Léger was apparently “disappointed by Venice”. The artist’s subsequent account of his impressions was summed up in an article published in November 1924 in Le Bulletin de la vie artistique. It revealed his overall distaste for the Italian Renaissance masters and his preference for Byzantine art, in particular, the mosaics he encountered in Ravenna. The impact of seeing these remarkable works firsthand would prove highly consequential as Léger would himself embark on monumental art projects, including large-scale mosaics, in the later stages of his career.

Besides the present work, Léger executed two related oils depicting the artist and his dealer in Venice, the first stop of their Italian journey. In the present work, the figure on the left, with a rolled-up piece of paper under his arm, is the artist himself, while the slightly more dapper-looking figure fashioning a bowler hat and a cane is Rosenberg. One of such paintings is in the collection of Philadelphia Museum of Art (see fig. 6). Of four related drawings, two belong to the collections of the Musée national Fernand Léger in Biot and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (see fig. 7).

Paysage animé is a remarkable example of Léger’s highly experimental output from the mid-1920s, a pivotal period which saw the artist synthesize several key post-war artistic developments while at the same time developing his own distinct aesthetic centered around the exploration of a human figure in the mechanized environment of a modern city. The present painting is further distinguished for being an extremely rare instance of an autobiographical work within the artist’s œuvre, directly linked to an important trip Léger undertook that year which would have a profound effect on his subsequent practice. Presented at auction for the first time since 1944, Paysage animé has formed part of the same distinguished private collection for over forty years.