Fernand Léger

Galerie Simon, Paris

Galerie Louise Leiris, Paris (until at least 1950)

Gerard Bonnier, Stockholm (acquired by 1954)

Private Collection, Switzerland

Private Collection, Monte Carlo

Helly Nahmad Gallery, New York

Acquired from the above by the present owner

Stockholm, Svensk-Franska Konstgalleriet, Fernand Léger - Retrospektiv Utstalening, 1948, no. 12

Verviers, Société Royale des Beaux-Arts; Ghent, Cercle Royal Artistique et Littéraire & Brussels, Palais des Beaux-Arts, La peinture sous le signe d'Apollinaire, 1950, no. 33

Stockholm, Liljevalchs Konsthall, Fran Cézanne till Picasso, 1954, no. 193

Charlottenborg, Efterars Udstillingen, 1959, illustrated in the catalogue

Stockholm, Moderna Museet, Fernand Léger, 1964, no. 27, illustrated in the catalogue

London, Helly Nahmad Gallery, Braque, Gris, Léger, Picasso: Cubism and Beyond, 2001, no. 30, illustrated in colour in the catalogue

London, Helly Nahmad Gallery, Les années folles: Paris in the Twenties, 2008, illustrated in colour in the catalogue

E. Tériade, Fernand Léger, Paris, 1928, illustrated p. 87

Georges Bauquier, Fernand Léger, Le catalogue raisonné de l'œuvre peint, 1925-1928, Paris, 1993, no. 512, illustrated in colour p. 207

The canvas is lined. Apart from some small spots of retouching in the blue pigment of the fish, and a few other very small spots of retouching, visible under ultra-violet light, this work is in good condition. Colours: Overall fairly accurate in the printed catalogue illustration, although the green and blue tones are stronger and brighter in the original.
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In 1927 Léger executed several compositions on the subject of a still-life featuring a bunch of grapes and a fish, combined with abstract, geometrically shaped elements. Merging the traditionally opposed manners of figurative and abstract painting, in Grappe et poisson Léger created a dynamic composition that juxtaposes everyday objects and forms usually found in Léger’s still-lifes, with abstract forms such as the L-shaped bar resembling a ruler. The artist painted all elements of the composition in the same two-dimensional manner, thus emphasising the flatness of the picture plane. Even the recognisable commonplace objects are reduced to geometric shapes: the grapes are represented as overlapping circles, while the fish displays the same chequered pattern as the draughtboard featuring in several compositions painted the same year.

 

The elegant and clearly delineated composition of Grappe et poisson points to the impact of the Purism of Ozenfant and Le Corbusier on Léger’s painting during this time. A search for classical beauty and balance that characterised the so-called rappel à l’ordre influenced many avant-garde artists working in Europe in the aftermath of the First World War. During this time Léger focused his creative output on the still-life genre, combining everyday objects with elements of the natural world (fig. 2). Executed in large blocks of solid unmodulated pigment, the work encapsulates Léger’s belief in the key role of pure colour in his painting. Rather than representing a likeness of the world that surrounds him, the artist uses overlapping patches of colour as the principal element of the composition, creating new spatial relationships within the two-dimensional plane of the canvas.

 

Writing about Léger’s works of 1927, Douglas Cooper observed: ‘Gradually he exchanged the monumental for the living. The architectural elements disappeared and were replaced by scattered objects setting up a rhythm between themselves, while the space in which they moved was created by pushing the objects into the foreground and setting up a play of colours in the background. The objects are related to each other by means of carefully controlled chromatic values, by similar or opposing rhythms and by the use of lines of direction which weave in and out through the whole composition. Léger places his objects at just the right distance from each other: they are held there by virtue of the laws of harmony and rhythm’ (D. Cooper, Fernand Léger et le nouvel espace, London, 1949, p. XIV). In the present composition, Léger achieved this sense of rhythm through a juxtaposition of circular, straight and diagonal lines and a bright palette, set against a dark monochromatic background.

 

Léger himself explained the abstract element of his painting: ‘The realistic value of a work of art is completely independent of any imitative character. This truth should be accepted as dogma and made axiomatic in the general understanding of painting. [...] Pictorial realism is the simultaneous ordering of three great plastic components: Lines, Forms and Colours. [...] the modern concept is not a reaction against the impressionists' idea but is, on the contrary, a further development and expansion of their aims through the use of methods they neglected. [...] Present-day life, more fragmented and faster moving than life in previous eras, has had to accept as its means of expression an art of dynamic divisionism; and the sentimental side, the expression of the subject (in the sense of popular expression), has reached a critical moment. [...] The modern conception is not simply a passing abstraction, valid only for a few initiates; it is the total expression of a new generation whose needs it shares and whose aspirations it answers’ (quoted in Dorothy Kosinski (ed.), Fernand Léger, 1911-1924, The Rhythm of Modern Life, Munich & New York, 1994, pp. 66-67).