Painted in 1952, Nature morte aux trois papillons exemplifies Fernand Léger’s mastery of color, form and composition, each deftly and assuredly harnessed by this mature stage of his career. Against an arresting medley of richly saturated forms, a crisply rendered still life of a riotous green plant in a red pot, surrounded by a small flock of tiny monochrome butterflies, is displayed; painted at an angle, and encircled by a sinuously winding abstract form, the still life seems almost as it is on the verge of toppling over, as if the very composition has come to life before our eyes. Within his fascinating visual collage of layered shapes, Leger’s still life flits between the realms of the figurative and abstract, drawing and intermingling the two together within a dynamic whole. The contrast between the familiar imagery of the central still life and the more ambiguous graphic forms which surround result in an intriguing visual synergy, as our eye seeks further legibility within the composition. The present work was notably selected by Léger for inclusion in the 1952 Venice Biennale, where the artist exhibited a selection of paintings in the French Pavilion.
Exemplified in Nature morte aux trois papillons, the still life, more than any other subject or motif, functioned as the vehicle for Léger’s unceasing development and metamorphoses as an artist across the varied stages of his career. From the fractured forms of his Cubist works, to the colorful shapes of his Purist compositions, Léger leveraged the versatility of the genre to experiment with form, color and composition. Describing the core principles of his artistic practice, the appeal to Léger is clear:
“It is… possible to assert the following: that color has a reality in itself, a life of its own; that geometric form has also a reality in itself, independent and plastic [...] There was never any question in plastic art, in poetry, in music, of representing anything. It is a matter of making something beautiful, moving, or dramatic—this is by no means the same thing [...] Commonplace objects, objects turned out in a series, are often more beautiful in proportion than many things called beautiful and given a badge of honor [...] My objective is to try and establish the following: no more cataloguing of beauty into hierarchies—that is the most clumsy mistake possible. Beauty is everywhere, in the arrangement of saucepans on the white wall of your kitchen, perhaps more there than in your eighteenth-century salon or in official museums..."
Executed in the final decade of the artist’s life, the composition and subject of Nature morte aux trois papillons recall Léger’s output from the late 1930s, when he began to incorporate butterflies, flowers and underwater plants into his still lifes. After a period of working with purely abstract imagery, Léger reintroduced realistic subjects into his paintings in the 1940s and 50s. Within the present work, Léger combines the recognizable forms of the plant, pot and butterflies with unidentified, twisting forms and ambiguous blocks of color, deftly balancing the volumetric forms and saturated hues to create a harmonious composition.
Right: Roy Lichtenstein, Purist Still Life, 1975, The Broad Museum, Lost Angeles © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein
Rendered in vivid primary hues, this dynamic layering of forms creates the immediate impression of dynamism and vitality within the composition that belies the two-dimensionality of the picture plane. The simplicity and apparent "flatness" with which the artist has composed the picture is evocative not only of the still lifes of Henri Matisse, such as Still Life on a Blue Table from 1947, but also of the techniques associated today with the generation of Pop artists and street artists who followed Léger in their elevation of everyday objects. Traces of Léger’s legacy as a still-life painter can be found in the works of such artists as Roy Lichtenstein, Keith Haring, David Hockney and Jonas Wood, among others.