Fernand Léger

Galerie Simon, Paris

Buchholz Gallery (Curt Valentin), New York

Sidney Janis Gallery, New York (no. 3124; by 1957)

Mr. and Mrs. Oscar Kolin, New York (acquired from the above in 1971 and until at least 1995)

Pace Wildenstein, New York

Private Collection, United States (by 2002)

Sale: Christie's, London, June 21, 2005, lot 37

Acquired at the above sale

New York, The Museum of Modern Art, Three Modern Styles, 1949

New York, Sidney Janis Gallery, Fernand Léger: Major Themes, 1957, no. 14

New York, Sidney Janis Gallery, Sixth Exhibition of Paintings by Fernand Léger, Selected from the Years 1918-1954, 1960-61

Cologne, Museen der Stadt Köln, Fernand Léger, Das Figürliche Werk, 1978, no. 12 (as dating from 1921)

Los Angeles County Museum of Art, L'Esprit Nouveau: Purism in Paris, 1918-1925, 2001

Georges Bauquier, Fernand Léger, Catalogue raisonné de l'oeuvre peint, 1920-1924, Paris, 1992, no. 242, illustrated p. 86

Very good condition. Original canvas. Under ultra-violet light there are scattered specks of inpainting in the upper left corner in the rectangle of white pigment. There are also specks of inpainting in the upper right corner in the white pigment. There are also minor touch-ups at the upper center addressing frame abrasions as well as the same small specks running along the bottom edge addressing frame abrasion. Other than a few more minor specks of inpainting which are found in some of the other areas of white pigment the body is almost entirely untouched as is all the colored areas of the composition.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

In La Femme couchée, painted in 1920, Léger returned to one of the classic themes in Western art but imbued it with a distinctively modern sensibility. From Titian and Velasquez to Ingres and Renoir, the theme of the reclining woman had been one of the constant preoccupations of the greatest figure painters. After a decade disrupted by World War I during which time Léger found inspiration in the mechanization of society, he was ready for a change. As he remarked: "I had broken the human body, so I set about putting it together again and rediscovering the human face... I wanted a rest, a breathing space. After the dynamism of the mechanical period, I felt a need for the staticity of figures."

 

It is revealing that in the Catalogue raisonné by Georges Bauquier, the painting immediately preceding the present work is Le Blessé II (Bauquier 241), a reference to Léger's own experiences in the trenches during the war. In part this dramatic change in subject matter may be attributed to the inner dynamics of Léger's own situation as he sought to rediscover a sense of equilibrium that had been deliberately suppressed during the preceding tumultuous decade. There were also broader cultural currents influencing this change of emphasis, however, notably the deliberate return to classicism epitomized in Jean Cocteau's call for a Rappel à l'ordre (Return to Order). Also of significance is the influence of the Purism of Ozenfant and Le Corbusier, which stressed reductive volumes and structures.

 

Christopher Green has noted that "Perhaps for as much as half of the year 1920 Léger remained uncompromisingly true to his brash, anti-order convictions, and continued with certain of the subjects and pictorial practices taken to such a pitch the year before.... Yet, when Léger initiated his "call to order" in 1920, 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 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 a conspicuous structural stability" (Christopher Green, Léger and the Avant-garde, New York, 1976, p. 197).

 

In the present work there is a pronounced contrast between the figure, which is rendered in a sequence of volumetric curved forms drained of color, and the staccato geometrical rhythms of the background, which owe much to the influence of the De Stijl artists Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg. While responding to the superficial aspects of the style rather than to its philosophical underpinnings, Léger utilized its reductionism to stabilize his figure paintings of the 1920s. In the months following the completion of La Femme couchée, Léger painted a second version of the theme in a longer, horizontal format. In a further sequence of paintings, the form of the reclining figure is interrupted by two or three standing figures (see Figs. 1 and 2).

Fig. 1, Fernand Léger, Les deux femmes à la nature morte, 2e état, 1920, oil on canvas, Van der Heydt Museum, Wuppertal

Fig. 2, Fernand Léger, Les trois femmes à la nature morte, 1920, Dallas Museum of Art, James H. and Likian Clark Foundation