Fernand Léger

Léonce Rosenberg, Paris

Klaus Perls, New York

Alain Tarica, Paris

Sale: Galerie Motte, Geneva, December 7-13, 1973, lot 47

Sale: Christie's, London, December 4, 1979, lot 30

Sale: Christie's, London, March 28, 1988, lot 30

Perls Galleries, New York (by 1995)

Private Collection, London

Acquired from the above by the present owner

New York, Perls Galleries, Fernand Léger (1881-1955), Oil Paintings, 1968, no. 6, illustrated in the catalogue

Turin, Fondazione Palazzo Bricherasio, Fernand Léger, d'oggetto e il mio contesto 1920-40, 1996, no. 15, illustrated in color in the catalogue

E. Tériade, "Oeuvres récentes de Léger.  Les objets dans l'espace," Cahiers d'Art, III, no. 4,  Paris, 1928, illustrated p. 152

Waldemar George, Fernand Léger, Paris, 1929, illustrated p. 25

"Fernand Léger au Kunsthaus de Zurich," Cahiers d'Art, VIII, no. 3-4, Paris, 1933, illustrated (titled Composition en ovale)

Georges Bauquier,  Fernand Léger, Catalogue raisonné de l'oeuvre peint, 1925-1928, Paris, 1993, no. 541, illustrated p. 257

Original canvas. Under ultra-violet light, a few small dots of retouching in the upper right of the oval. In the dark blue background, there are some scattered areas of restoration, mostly extending along the lower section of the canvas. The most significantly retouched areas are: 1 square inch on the left and approximately 2 by 1 inch square on are along the bottom right. This work is in generally good condition.
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.

Cinematically inset within a field of dark blue, this composite of colorful objects is an excellent example of Léger's work at the end of the 1920s, when the aesthetic of film influenced his painting.   Film stills and moving pictures, with their capacity to be spliced and superimposed, offered artists hitherto unimaginable ways to conceptualize their world.  Léger was not immune to the lure of this new medium and its power to shuffle and fragment scenes from life and repurpose objects in entirely new contexts. "Cinema gives 'the fragment' personality," Léger marvelled in 1931.   "It sits in a frame, and thereby creates a 'new realism' whose implications may be incalculable.  A collar button, put under the projector, magnified a hundred times, becomes a radiating planet.  A brand-new lyricism of the transformed object comes into the world" (quoted in C. Lanchner, Fernand Léger (exhibition catalogue), The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1998, p. 206). 

When he painted the present work in 1928, the penchant for Surrealism had reached fever pitch among the avant-garde.  To a certain extent, Léger's pictures from this era incorporated elements of the Surrealist dialectic, like those found in the works of Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp.  But as Carolyn Lanchner explains, "Léger aimed for a 'new realism' rather than the kind of exploration of the unconscious pursued by the Surrealists.  It was a realism of combining not just the abstract and the representational but several different modes of the representational... The combination of these various modes reflects the artist's growing interest in the aesthetic tastes of the working people.  As he had said in 1923, 'It is necessary to distract man from his enormous and often disagreeable labors, to surround him with a pervasive new plastic order in which to live'" (ibid., p. 209).