Fernand Léger

Sale: Hôtel Drouot, Paris, March 15, 1979, lot 19
Galerie Fabian Boulakia, Paris
Private Collection (acquired from the above circa 1979 and sold: Christie’s, London, June 23, 2004, lot 246)
Acquired at the above sale by the present owner

Georges Bauquier, Fernand Léger, Catalogue raisonné de l’oeuvre peint 1938-1943, Paris, 1998, no. 1023, illustrated p. 82

The work is in very good condition. The canvas is unlined. Faint stretcher marks run horizontally through the center of the composition. There are also a couple faint and stable lines of craquelure within the thicker white pigments at lower center. Faint pentimenti are visible, including the upper right corner and upper center. Overall, the surface is slightly dirty. Under UV light: strokes of inpainting are visible along the extreme upper edge of the canvas, as well as in small pindots to the extreme lower left corner, likely to address some frame abrasion.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

After completing his service with the Premier Régiment du Génie de Versailles engineering corps during World War I, Léger became close with Amedée Ozenfant and Charles-Edouard Jeanneret—better known as Le Corbusier—who introduced him to the style known as Purism. Striving to "purify" the arts through stripped-down forms and bold colors, Purism would influence Léger’s work throughout much of the 1920s and 1930s (see fig. 1). However, hesitant to align himself so closely with a particular dogma, Léger remained ambivalent about the impact this movement would have on his work, stating, “Purism did not appeal to me. Too thin to me, that closed-in world. But it had to be done all the same; someone had to go to the extreme” (quoted in Jean Cassou & Jean Leymarie, Fernand Léger, Drawings and Gouaches, London, 1973, p. 87). By the time he painted Composition I in 1938, Léger had an established practice of infusing his works with sinuous lines, organic shapes and a busier, more spontaneous composition. A decade of experimentation with the rigid geometries of Purism had given way to a more fluid, organic aesthetic. Beginning in 1929, Léger’s decorative concepts permeated many of his object paintings. This period marks an important moment in the artist’s move away from the rigid, mechanical vocabulary that characterized his earlier work and his embrace of a more organic, less narrative-based aesthetic. This shift can be seen in the present work, Composition I, with its quasi-abstract forms, meticulously drawn and painted, that seem to float in a velvety blue space devoid of depth. Abandoning any spatial references of the traditional still life, Léger definitively frees his objects from the geometric structure of the painting and lets them float in tri-colored space imbued with a sense of enchantment. The artist himself once stated: "The subject in painting has already been destroyed, just as avant-garde film destroyed the storyline" (quoted in Jean Cassou & Jean Leymarie, ibid., p. 87). He realized that he needed to liberate the object from its setting, to extract it from its conventional context and relationships, and let it exist for its own sake in a new isolated, revitalized state. As Léger later stated, "In painting, the strongest restraint has been that of subject matter upon composition, imposed by the Italian Renaissance. The effort towards freedom began with the Impressionists and has continued to express itself until our day… the feeling for the object is already in primitive pictures—in works of the high periods of Egyptian, Assyrian, Greek, Roman and Gothic art. The Moderns are going to develop it, isolate it, and extract every possible result of it” (quoted in “The New Realism" in Edward F. Fry, ed., Fernand Léger: Functions of Painting, New York, 1973, p. 109).