Fernand Léger

Galerie Louise Leiris, Paris
Collection Lydia Conti
Perls Galleries, New York
Galerie Malingue, Paris
Acquired from the above in 1981 by the family of the present owner

New York, Perls Galleries, Fernand Léger, 1952, no. 9
New York, Perls Galleries, Modern French Paintings, 1953, no. 70

Claude Laugier & Michèle Richet, Léger. Œuvres de Fernand Léger 1881-1955, Paris, 1981, illustrated p. 67
Georges Bauquier, Fernand Léger. Catalogue raisonné de l'œuvre peint. 1926-1928, Paris, 1993, no. 568, illustrated p. 296

The canvas is lined, probably by the artist. There is an uneven varnish through which the UV light cannot fully penetrate and which causes some areas to fluoresce in a way that is not consistent with retouching. There do not appear to be any retouchings visible under UV light. The canvas is slightly unudulated at the upper right corner and there are a few very light surface scratches to the varnish in places. Otherwise, this work is in overall good condition. Colours: overall fairly accurate in the printed catalogue, though the blue is slightly darker in the original.
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La Danseuse Bleue is one of two ‘Blue Dancer’ paintings that Léger painted in 1928. While the present canvas may seem modestly sized when compared with the monumental paintings for which he is best known, it represents an early and extraordinary example of Leger’s departure from a more traditionally Cubist aesthetic on his quest to define a more personalized style. The image depicts an abstracted, simplified nude female dancer amidst a multitude of flattened shapes and forms; the primary colours and geometric shapes are reminiscent of earlier compositions, yet they have a certain fluidity of line and figure that was only just beginning to enter his œuvre.

Léger’s composition also exemplifies the powerful influences of Surrealism on the artist’s aesthetic at this time in his career. Although he never formally aligned himself with the group, he was undoubtedly aware of the biomorphic imagery that had begun to pervade the pictures of Miró and Dalí during this same period. La Danseuse Bleue is a superb example of Léger’s subtle incorporation of linear flourishes and amoeboid forms - mainstays of Surrealist iconography - in the fine-tuning of his Purist approach.

Writing about Léger's paintings of the late 1920s, Christopher Green commented that ‘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’ (Christopher Green, Léger and the Avant-Garde, New Haven & London, 1976, p. 310).