Fernand Léger

Atelier Fernand Léger
Galerie Louise Leiris, Paris
Perls Galleries, New York (acquired in 1980)

Berlin, Staatliche Kunsthalle, Fernand Léger, 1980, no. 138
Caracas, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Fernand Léger, 1982, no. 83
New York, James Goodman Gallery, Paintings, Watercolors & Drawings by Dubuffet, Léger & Picasso, 1988, no. 18

Irus Hansma & Claude Lefebvre du Preÿ, Fernand Léger, Catalogue raisonné de l’oeuvre peint, 1954-1955, Paris, 2013, no. 1624, illustrated pp. 60-61  

The canvas is not lined. Under UV light, some very minor spots fluoresce notably in the lower half of the composition. Otherwise this work is in excellent condition.
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The present painting, executed in 1954, is part of a series of paintings, gouaches and sculptures on the theme of sunflowers. In Deux tournesols sur fond bleu, the artist juxtaposes the natural with the mechanical, rendering his flowers with both an organic, curvilinear outline and a bold geometric patchwork of unmodulated colour. The freedom with which Léger applied colour by this stag in his career heightens this dynamic. As Léger stated, “…colour has a reality in itself, a life of its own; that geometric form has also a reality in itself, independent and plastic…It is a matter of making something beautiful, moving or dramatic…” (quoted in Picasso, Braque, Léger: Masterpieces from Swiss Collections, exh. cat., Minneapolis, 1975, pp. 65-66, 69).

Léger’s revolutionary ideas about colour and form were widely influential. In a 1997 interview with the contemporary artist Roy Lichtenstein conducted by Katherine J. Michaelsen, Lichtenstein was asked his opinion on Léger, and the elder artist’s depictions of flowers came to mind: “Even his flowers have black lines around them, or they’re made of ceramic, and they’re big and heavy and they don’t have anything of the flower. I love the idea of that” (quoted in Hatje Cantz, Fernand Léger Paris – New York, exh. cat., Basel, 2008, p. 157).