FERNAND LÉGER | Étude pour "La Grande parade"

(Probably) Jeanne-Augustine Lohy, Paris (the wife of the artist)
Private Collection, Florida (and sold: Sotheby's, New York, May 17, 1990, lot 198)
Private Collection, Switzerland (acquired at the above sale)
Sale: Christie's, New York, November 7, 2007, lot 212
Howard Russeck Fine Art, Palm Beach (acquired at the above sale)

Jean Cassou & Jean Leymarie, Fernand Léger, Drawings and Gouaches, London, 1973, no. 299, illustrated p. 199 
Jean Cassou & Jean Leymarie, Fernand Léger, Dessins et gouaches, nouvelle édition, 2012, no. 16-147, http://www.legerdessinsetgouaches.com/tableaux/etude-pour-la-grande-parade-1/ (accessed on September 11, 2019)

Executed on cream wove paper. There are four artist's pinholes in the upper left corner, three artist's pinholes in the upper right corner and four artist's pinholes in the upper center. The top edge is lightly deckled. The sheet is slightly time stained and the pigments are slightly faded. Otherwise, fine. This work is in overall very good condition.
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Étude pour "La Grande parade" is a preparatory work for Léger's monumental masterpiece of 1954, La Grande parade, now in the collection of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York (see fig. 1). The present work is a superb example of Léger's fascination with the expressive potential of color and geometric technique, both hallmarks of his work. Léger renders the pictorial elements of the current study using vivid planes of color for the background while outlining the figures' contours with bold, black lines. The colors, in keeping with his works of this period, are bold and fully saturated. The preparatory series for La Grande parade includes clowns, acrobats, musicians and dancers performing together in a colorful mass. For Léger, the circus was a passion: "If I have drawn circus people, acrobats, clowns, jugglers, it is because I have taken an interest in their work for thirty years... A year elapsed between the first state of La Grande parade and its final state. This interval corresponds to a lengthy process of elaboration and synthesis. The slightest transformation was long pondered and worked up with the help of new drawings. A local alteration often involved changing the entire composition because it affected the balance of the whole" (quoted in Werner Schmalenbach, Fernand Léger, London, 1991, p. 126).