Fernand Léger

Galerie Simon, Paris

Galerie Louise Leiris, Paris

Alex Maguy, Paris

Private Collection (sold: Sotheby's, New York, November 2, 2005, lot 25)

Acquired at the above sale by the present owner

Basel/Riehen, Fondation Beyeler, Fernand Léger, Paris-New York, 2008, no. 42, llustrated in color in the catalogue

E. Tériade, Fernand Léger, Paris, 1928, illustrated p. 64

Christopher Green, Léger and the Avant-Garde, New Haven & London, 1976, discussed p. 313

Georges Bauquier, Fernand Léger, Catalogue raisonné, 1925-1928, Paris, 1993, no. 456, illustrated p. 111 

Good condition. Canvas has been lined. The surface of the canvas still exhibits nice brushwork by the artist and the paint layer is very stable. Under UV: There are several scattered nail-head spots of inpainting throughout the upper portion of the canvas. There are four pin-head sized spots of inpainting to the left of the figure’s forehead. There are pin-head sized spots of inpainting in the figure’s nose. Finally, there are three (3) one-quarter inch circular dots of inpainting in the upper left, lower left and lower right extreme corners of the canvas.
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.

Le Profil belongs to a series of paintings that Léger executed in 1926, culminating in the large Composition avec profil, now in the collection of the Von der Heydt Museum in Wuppertal, which is almost a mirror-image of the present work.  

All paintings from this group depict the same near-abstract forms, highly geometricized fragments of everyday objects.  Characterized by sharp lines, neutral shapes and painted in a muted palette, these objects are rendered with an almost mathematical precision and clarity, associated with the work of the Purist artists Le Corbusier and Amédée Ozenfant.  Even the human profile of unidentified gender is subjected to this mechanical treatment.

Writing about Léger's paintings executed between 1925 and 1927, Christopher Green commented:  "They are the product of a pictorial idea of the figure or object whose brutal 'plastic' simplicity is personal, but which is the product of an approach to the realities of modern life indelibly tinged with the idealism of L'Esprit Nouveau, an approach which remains stubbornly 'realist' but whose highly selective vision of the world picks out the most useful, the most geometrically 'pure', the most precisely finished of its manufactures, and subjects even the nude or the figurative fragment to the mass-production yet 'classical' values thus extracted.  And in their grand, harmonious architecture with its clear articulation of spatial incident, these paintings are at the same time the product of an international avant-garde... Their assurance and the conviction they carry is founded on more than fifteen years of faith in what was then most modern about the industrial world, of openness to what was most new in the avant-garde and of experiment in book illustration, theatre and film as well as in painting"  (Green, op. cit., p. 310).