費爾南.雷捷

Dr Julien Pergola, Paris (acquired by 1961. Sold: Christie's, London, 25th June 1996, lot 57)
Barbara Mathes Gallery, New York
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1998

Moscow, Pushkin Museum, Fernand Léger, 1963

New York, Barbara Mathes Gallery, Forms & Rhythms: Alexander Calder, Stuart Davis, Fernand Léger, 1997

 

Dora Vallier, 'La Vie dans l'Œuvre de Léger', in Cahiers d'Art, no. 2, Paris, 1954, illustrated in colour pl. 143

Executed on cream wove paper, not laid down, hinged to the overmount at three points along the reverse of the upper edge. The right and left edges are slightly unevenly cut (not visible when framed). There are several artist's pinholes in the upper corners. Apart from some areas of paint shrinkage in the yellow pigments with some minor associated paint losses, this work is in very good condition. Colours: Overall fairly accurate in the printed catalogue illustration, although the colours are more vibrant and richer in the original.
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NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

La Grande parade, Deuxième état, is one of the important preparatory works for Léger's monumental oil of 1954, La Grande parade (fig. 1), now in the collection of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. It manifests Léger's method of tireless experimentation on a given theme in a wide spectrum of adaptations and interchanges. Léger recognised this process as salient to his output: 'The more I watch myself, the more I see that I am a classic. I do long preparatory work. First I do a quantity of drawings, then I do gouaches, and lastly I pass on to the canvas; but when I tackle that I have 80 percent assurance. I know where I'm going' (quoted in Werner Schmalenbach, Fernand Léger, London, 1991, p. 126).

The present work, rendered in thick layers of gouache, watercolour and ink, incorporates the solidly linear figures that had populated Léger's best work since the 1920s. Shape and form had always been primary concerns for the artist, but by the last years of his career he began to incorporate narrative into his highly-geometric compositions. La Grande parade, Deuxième état depicts a parade of circus performers at a fairground, a theme which had fascinated several leading artists of the early 20th century including Picasso and Chagall. Léger's interest in the circus dated as far back as the late 1910s, when he designed Cubist-style costumes for the acrobatic troupe at Paris' famed Cirque Medrano. By the 1950s, populist subjects became central themes in Léger's art, and the ritualised entertainment of the circus came to epitomise the celebration of leisure activity. 

Léger continuously developed his depiction of La Grande parade, Deuxième état throughout the early 1950s, culminating with the Guggenheim canvas in 1954.  His many manifestations of the theme in a variety of media were part of what Léger described as 'a lengthy process of elaboration and synthesis. The slightest transformation was long pondered and worked up with the help of new drawings. A local alteration often involved changing the entire composition because it affected the balance of the whole' (ibid., p. 126).

With its broad colour bands and boldly delineated forms, the present work defines the style for which Léger would be known in the last years of his life. The transparent figures, rendered in heavy black outline, are given their colour by swaths of red, blue, green and yellow that sweep across the canvas. Léger once explained this liberal approach to colour as it applies to this series:  'You are talking to someone and all of a sudden he becomes blue,' he said.  'As soon as that colour fades another comes and he turns red or yellow. That kind of color, projected color, is free; it exists in space. I wanted to have the same thing in my canvases' (quoted in Simon Willmoth, 'Léger in America', in Fernand Léger: The Late Years (exhibition catalogue), Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 1987-88, p. 51).

FIG. 1, Fernand Léger, La Grande parade, état définitif, 1954, oil on canvas, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

FIG. 2, Léger in his studio at Gif-sur-Yvette with La Grande parade, Musée National Fernand Léger, Biot