Fernand Léger

Private Collection, France (acquired directly from the artist)
Thence by descent

Monaco, Galerie Henri Bronne
Paris, Galerie Brame & Lorenceau

Executed on cream wove paper laid down on card, mounted with wooden blocks on a thick cardboard backing board. There is a very slight waviness to the right edge. There is a tiny media mark in the unpainted semicircle below the centre, possibly inherent to the artist's process. Apart from two finger smudges near the lower left corner and some minuscule specks of foxing, this work is in very good condition.
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This gouache inspired a painting bought by the famous Parisian art dealer Léonce Rosenberg, now in the collections of the Kunstmuseum in Basel. Continuing in the vein of the artist’s mechanical period, but executed in a much more simplistic and rigorous manner, Nature Morte à la Guitare embodies Léger’s Purist phase, a movement that he discovered at the beginning of the 1920s at the Galerie l’Effort Moderne, directed at the time by Léonce Rosenberg. Jean Leymarie notes that Fernand Léger is during that period “in contact with Mondrian and the members of the Dutch magazine De Stijl […], aware of the research carried out at the Bauhaus and by the Russian Constructivists, but it is mainly with Ozenfant and Jeanneret (Le Corbusier), founders of l’Esprit Nouveau, that he has the closest relationship, while distancing himself from a movement that wants to get rid of Cubism and whose doctrinal narrowness is contrary to the popular force of his instinct” (Jean Leymarie, Fernand Léger: Dessins et Gouaches, Paris, 1972, p. 87).

It was the discovery of Jeanneret’s and Ozenfant’s works of art that influenced the still-lifes of fragmented objects which dominated Léger's art in the beginning of the 1920s. The artist explained that he “completed paintings whose important elements were objects set right outside of any kind of atmosphere and unconnected with anything normal—objects isolated from the subjects I had abandoned. Subjects in painting had already been destroyed, just as avant-garde film had destroyed the story-line. I thought that the object, which had been neglected and poorly exploited, was the thing to replace the subject" (Jean Leymarie, Fernand Léger: Dessins et Gouaches, Paris, 1972, p. 87). Léger was partly inspired by the windows of Parisian shops, crowded with objects, and by cinema, of which he was a connoisseur. In 1924, two years before the present work was created, the artist produced a movie without a script, Ballet Mécanique, in which we see fragmented objects and their rhythmic repetition. In this almost architectural composition, in which the vivid colours and circular forms of the guitar and the vase contrast with the black column in the centre of the piece, the artist frees himself from the Classical still-life by choosing to represent the objects alone, in their own space, separated from their environment. This layout was necessary for Léger who felt that he “couldn’t put (his) objects on a table without diminishing their value” (Fernand Léger, 1954, quoted in Carolyn Lanchner, The Museum of Modern Art, Fernand Léger (exhibition catalogue), New York, 1998, p. 206).