Fernand Léger

Galerie Louise Leiris, Paris
Sylvain Durand, Paris
Galerie Beyeler, Basel
Collection Dunkelman, Toronto
Private Collection
Sale: Sotheby's Parke Bernet, New York, 13th May 1970, lot 63
Galerie Beyeler, Basel
Sale: Christie's, New York, 15th November 1990, lot 266
Purchased at the above sale by the late owner

Basel, Galerie Beyeler, Fernand Léger, Werke 1925-55, 1994-95, no. 18, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Oslo, Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Sal Haaken. Opening Exhibition of the Collection of Magister Haaken A. Christensen, 2003, illustrated in colour in the catalogue

Georges Bauquier, Fernand Léger. Catalogue raisonné de l'œuvre peint, 1938-1943, Paris, 1998, no. 977, illustrated in colour p. 13

The canvas is unlined and there is no evidence of retouching under ultra-violet light. This work is in very good original condition. Colours: Overall fairly accurate, although slightly fresher in the original.
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In the late 1930s Léger painted a number of compositions using images of the natural world, such as butterflies, flowers and underwater plants. In L'Araignée verte, images of a spider and clouds are combined with the more abstract forms, all painted in strong, unmodulated colour and silhouetted against the flat background. The vivid, undulating forms are rendered in primary tones, combined with black and white, colours that, according to Léger, express the reality of the medium of painting. Rather than imitating nature, the artist was interested in exploring the language of painting in its fullest and purest form, thus reducing his vocabulary to the elements of colour and form. As a result, Léger's composition defies a sense of gravity and transcends the earth-bound nature of a traditional landscape.

 

 

Léger himself described the increasing level of abstraction in his painting: 'The realistic value of a work of art is completely independent of any imitative character. This truth should be accepted as dogma and made axiomatic in the general understanding of painting [...] Pictorial realism is the simultaneous ordering of three great plastic components: Lines, Forms and Colours [...] the modern concept is not a reaction against the impressionists' idea but is, on the contrary, a further development and expansion of their aims through the use of methods they neglected [...] Present-day life, more fragmented and faster moving than life in previous eras, has had to accept as its means of expression an art of dynamic divisionism; and the sentimental side, the expression of the subject (in the sense of popular expression), has reached a critical moment [...] The modern conception is not simply a passing abstraction, valid only for a few initiates; it is the total expression of a new generation whose needs it shares and whose aspirations it answers' (quoted in Dorothy Kosinski (ed.), Fernand Léger, 1911-1924, The Rhythm of Modern Life, Munich & New York, 1994, pp. 66-67).