Fernand Léger

Léonce Rosenberg (Galerie de l'Effort Moderne), Paris

Private Collection (acquired from the above in the 1930s)

Acquired by descent from the above

Paris, Galerie Louise Leiris, Fernand Léger, Études et tableaux, 1990, no. 9, illustrated in color in the catalogue

Paris, Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou; Madrid, Museo nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia & New York, Museum of Modern Art, Fernand Léger, 1997-98, no. 44, (title in singular Élément mécanique)

Bulletin de l’Effort Moderne, Paris, 1925, illustrated

“Fernand Léger au Kunsthaus de Zurich,” Cahiers d’Art, Paris, 1933, illustrated

Jean Cassou & Jean Leymarie, Léger, dessins et gouaches, Paris, 1972, illustrated T46

Léger et l’Esprit moderne 1918-1931 (exhibition catalogue), Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris, 1982, fig. 13, illustrated p. 96

Georges Bauquier, Fernand Léger, Catalogue raisonné, 1925-1928, Paris, 1993, no. 401, illustrated in color p. 14 (titled in the plural Éléments mécaniques)

Excellent condition. Original canvas. Under UV light, no evidence of retouching. In the pale brown rectangle in the upper center, there are two or three dark spots, but these appear to be original paint. There is stable cracking in isolated spots, such as in the blue in the upper center and the red oblong, but otherwise this condition is excellent.
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The powerful Élément mécanique dates from 1925, when clarity, precision and strength of form were Léger’s chief artistic concerns.  Throughout the twenties Léger’s compositions focused on tangible objects of modern living – pipes, bottles and other industrial products – as a direct response to his experience during the war, when the very foundations of life were completely torn asunder.   Abstraction, he believed, was an irrelevance in an age when production and modern technology should be celebrated.  His compositions of this era were essentially his tribute to industrial progress and to the perseverance of the human spirit in the aftermath of destruction.

 

This boldly-colored rendering of “mechanical element” alludes to the importance of architecture and structural design in Léger's painting in the years after the war and his association with the Purist artists Amédée Ozenfant and Charles-Edouard Jeanneret (Le Corbusier). Le Corbusier, who made more of a name for himself as an architect than as a painter, was a leading proponent of mathematical precision and the solidity of form in art. Léger was initially drawn to the general principles of Purism but ultimately found them too rigid for his painting. But in this picture, Léger focuses on the clarity and solid geometry of his objects, adhering to the primary concerns of the Purist objective.

 

 

Writing about Léger's oil paintings from 1924-27, 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" (C. Green, Léger and the Avant Garde, p. 310).