費爾南·雷捷

Bourdon Collection, Paris (after 1945)

Galerie Tarica, Paris (acquired from the above)

Acquired from the above by the present owners

Salzburg, Museum Moderne Kunst, Léger, L'esprit Moderne, 2002, illustrated in color in the catalogue

Barcelona, Fundacio Joan Miró, Exposicio Fernand Léger, 2002-03, no. 256

Georges Bauquier, Vivre dans le vrai, Paris, 1987, illustrated p. 312

Georges Bauquier, Fernand Léger, Catalogue raisonné de l’oeuvre peint, 1925-1928, Paris, 1993, no. 537, illustrated in color p. 248

Original canvas. A few noticeable cracks in the yellow leaves and in the whites to the left which are stable. Under UV light, there are a few scattered retouchings, most notable which is in the upper right quadrant in the white are to address cracking. Another mark of retouching to the left of the tree trunk. There are some hair line retouchings to the blue on the top left and in the white at the left. Overall the work is in very good condition.
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.

This composite of colorful objects is an excellent example of Léger's work at the end of the 1920s, when the aesthetic of film influenced his painting.   Film stills and moving pictures, with their capacity to be spliced and superimposed, offered artists hitherto unimaginable ways to conceptualize their world.  Léger was not immune to the lure of this new medium and its power to shuffle and fragment scenes from life and repurpose objects in entirely new contexts. "Cinema gives 'the fragment' personality," Léger marvelled in 1931.  "It sits in a frame, and thereby creates a 'new realism' whose implications may be incalculable.  A collar button, put under the projector, magnified a hundred times, becomes a radiating planet.  A brand-new lyricism of the transformed object comes into the world" (quoted in C. Lanchner, Fernand Léger (exhibition catalogue), The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1998, p. 206). 

When he painted the present work in the late 1920s, the penchant for Surrealism had reached a fever pitch among the avant-garde.  To a certain extent, Léger's pictures from this era incorporated elements of the Surrealist dialectic, like those found in the works of Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp.  But as Carolyn Lanchner explains, "Léger aimed for a 'new realism' rather than the kind of exploration of the unconscious pursued by the Surrealists.  It was a realism of combining not just the abstract and the representational but several different modes of the representational... The combination of these various modes reflects the artist's growing interest in the aesthetic tastes of the working people.  As he had said in 1923, 'It is necessary to distract man from his enormous and often disagreeable labors, to surround him with a pervasive new plastic order in which to live'" (ibid., p. 209).

We know that Léger kept this work in his collection until at least the mid-1940s, as his post-war address is written on the stretcher of this picture.  Presumably in the 1950's the picture became a part of the Bourdon collection in Paris, and it was sold by M. Tarica in the late 1960s or early 1970s to the present owners.