Fernand Léger

Perls Galleries, New York

Arnold H. Maremont, Chicago (acquired by 1961)

Sotheby Parke Bernet, New York, 1 May 1974, lot 9 (consigned by the above)

Modarco S.A. Collection, Geneva (acquired at the above sale)

M. Knoedler & Co., New York (acquired from the above)

Acquired from the above on 29 September 1978 by the present owner

New York, Perls Galleries, The Perls Galleries Collection of Modern French Paintings, 1953, no. 69

Chicago, Illinois Institute of Technology, The Maremont Collection at the Institute of Design, 1961, no. 75

Washington, D. C., Washington Gallery of Modern Art, Treasures of 20th Century Art from the Maremont Collection, 1964, no. 90, n.p.

Antwerp, Maison Osterrieth, 40 chefs-d’oeuvre de la Collection Modarco, 1975

Georges Bauquier, Fernand Léger: Catalogue raisonné, 1925-1928, Paris, 1993, no. 446, p. 96, illustrated

In the wake of World War I, a conflict which saw the machine play a role of unprecedented proportions, Léger returned from the frontlines with an optimism about the advent of the mechanical age that stood in marked contrast to the nihilism that weighed on many of his artistic contemporaries. Léger’s vision was firmly rooted in a commitment to creating a visual language that held a mirror to this modern condition—one which equipped his viewer with a visual literacy that could be applied to life itself within the new reality of a mechanized world. There is perhaps no more poignant vehicle for his vision of a “new realism” than in his radical reimagination of the still life. Nature morte à la bouteille is a paradigm of the success he found within the genre. Léger masterfully draws out the distinction between object and subject, reconstituting the visual material of the quotidian with an economy of form, color and compositional geometry which offers a resounding affirmation of the relationship between man and machine.

Though consciously devoid of any sentimentality, the namesake bottle in many ways becomes a specter for Léger’s insistence on a human presence within the composition. Still resolutely flattened, it is the only element within the work which bears the distinctly metallic quality of Léger’s most celebrated tubist style—its form accentuated by the metallic grey and the exaggerated shading which offers the only semblance of three dimensionality within the composition (see fig. 2). In this transposition of an object from everyday use into a setting apparently devoid of the human hand, and in communicating it with an acuity for the tactile quality of its plastic form, Léger allows the viewer a point of entry into the world which he lays out on the canvas.

Throughout art history, the bottle has served as a common fixture within the still life, a genre which was, from its earliest iterations, inextricably linked to its symbolic allusions to the transience of everyday life. With the advent of Cubism at the turn of the twentieth century, the still life was reintroduced as a vital mode of address, one which reconsidered objects in terms of their formal elements and so allowed for radical exploration into our modes of perception. As opposed to the precedent set by the Cubists, however, who fragmented and reconstructed the object within space as though seen from multiple perspectives at once, Léger remained resolute in his commitment to their physical, plastic qualities (see fig. 1).

After 1920, Léger’s paintings took on a more precise, static quality reflecting the rappel a l’ordre, the “call to order” then dominating the Paris avant-garde (see fig. 3). When Léger initiated his own “call to order” in 1920, it was towards a simpler, more coordinated presentation of stylistic contradictions, in which a more unified architecture provided the setting for a more explicit articulation of the relationship between man and machine. As in the present work, the mechanical element was swiftly replaced with common objects of everyday life. Doing away with this ambiguity worked in service of the same structural stability which the reformed avant-garde sought out in their Classical revival. But where these artists rejected the mechanical aesthetic of the modern age, Léger confronted it head first. In its earliest iteration, Léger expounded on this idea through his theory of contrasts which took the mechanical element as its starting point:

"The mechanical element is only a means and not an end. I consider it simply plastic 'raw material,' like the elements of a landscape or a still life…Instead of opposing comic and tragic characters and contrary scenic states, I organize the opposition of contrasting values, lines, and curves. I oppose curves to straight lines, flat surfaces to molded forms, pure local colors to nuances of gray,”

Fernand Leger, “Notes on the Mechanical Element,” 1923 (reproduced in Exh. Cat., New York, The Museum of Modern Art, Fernand Léger, 1998, p. 123)

In this defection to a pure objectivity, liberated from any narrative obligation, Léger masterfully transgresses the boundary between representation and abstraction.

Nature morte à la bouteille testifies to a pivotal moment in Léger’s early creative evolution wherein he came to discover and hone the plastic qualities of color itself. Beginning with his revered Contrastes de formes, Léger endeavored to explore the potential held within the juxtaposition of pure color as a means of describing three dimensional space. The present work marks a point of maturity in this new plastic vocabulary, where pure tones are radically transformed into volumetric weights, conferring on each a sense of objecthood. The planes of color which describe the background seem to float variously on top of and beneath each other, imbued with a physical integrity despite their distinctly two-dimensional articulation. There is felt within their organization a particular kinship with the tenets of De Stijl, and with the movement’s ambition to create a universal visual language through geometry and color which speaks to the condition of modern life. At Léger’s hand, this sense of organization confers on the composition a certain architecture which, though invented and nondescript, appears to be constructed with the same functionalism, the same beauty, as he so admired in the machine.