Lot 3253 - A183 Art Impressionniste & Moderne - vendredi, 08. décembre 2017, 16h00
FERNAND LÉGER
(Argentan 1881 - 1955 Gif-sur-Yvette)
Nature morte au parapluie et au chapeau melon. 1926.
Gouache on paper.
Monogrammed and dated lower right: F.L.26.
38.4 x 28.4 cm.
The authenticity of this work has been confirmed by Irus Hansma, Muri b. Bern, 23 August 2017. It will be included in the catalogue raisonné of the works on paper.
Provenance:
- (presumably) Léonce Rosenberg, Paris.
- Galerie Simon, Paris (with parts of the label on the reverse).
- Private property St. Gallen, by descent about 40 years ago.
Bowler hats and umbrellas were essential components of men's attire at the beginning of the 20th century. In this beautiful still-life Léger shows us these everyday companions of the middle-class worker. The hat rests on a chair, the umbrella in a stand. The objects are isolated from one another and only connected by the colours and the spatial architecture of the interior setting. From the beginning to the middle of the 1920s, the work of Fernand Léger increasingly moved towards Purism. He rendered objects of everyday use – objects possessing a certain social value – with meticulous sharpness, outside of space and atmosphere, and detached from their use.
The shift of the central focus onto the object was the direct result Léger's engagement with the medium of film and its new technical possibilities. In 1924, together with Dudley Murphy, George Antheil and Man Ray, he created the important short film "Ballet mecanique", which was tantamount to an artistic revolution and attracted a great deal of attention. Both Dadaist and Surrealist in character, it had no explicit script, as explained in an introductory text at the beginning: "Le Ballet Mécanique a été composé par le peintre Fernand Léger en 1924. C’est le premier film sans scénario." The film starts with a cubistically arranged figure with cane and bowler hat with the inscription "Charlot présente le Ballet Mécanique". Charlot is the French name of the American social figure of the Tramp, a character used by Charlie Chaplin.
In the film, various movement sequences of figures, objects and machines in unusual perspectives are shown detached through multiple repetitions. In doing so, individual objects are deliberately portrayed in unusual clips.
In a lecture delivered before students at the Sorbonne in 1925, Léger declared: "In 1923-1924, I completed paintings whose important elements were objects set right outside any kind of atmosphere and unconnected with anything normal – objects isolated from the subjects I had abandoned. The subject in painting had already been destroyed, just as avant-garde film had destroyed the story line. I thought that the object, which had been neglected and poorly exploited, was the thing to replace the subject" (cited in: J. Cassou and J. Leymarie, Fernand Léger Drawings and Gouaches, New York, 1973, p. 87).
"In the years 1926 and 1927, Léger's main concern was to remove the object from any compulsion, from its familiar position in the centre, from the monolithic representation, and finally to free it completely. […] This placement of the object, even if at first sight it may seem arbitrary, is precisely balanced and worked out. […] Leger, as he put it, "turned the coffee pot upside down," and completely. He "removes the table which Braque and Picasso have retained," and removes the object from its "concentric situation, in order to bring it into a centrifugal position." (Georges Bauquier, in Schmalenbach/Moeller, Fernand Leger, Kunsthalle Munich, 1988/89, for no. 22).
There is also a pencil study of this subject from 1925 (Cassou/Leymarie 1973, no. 124, p. 92) and a painting (Bauquier vol. III, 1993, no. 462, p. 122) which, like the gouache, is dated 1926 and which was with Léonce Rosenberg and Heinz Berggruen before entering the A. Conger Goodyear Fund and then the collections of the Museum of Modern Art of New York in 1959, where it is still held today.
Provenance:
- (presumably) Léonce Rosenberg, Paris.
- Galerie Simon, Paris (with parts of the label on the reverse).
- Private property St. Gallen, by descent about 40 years ago.
Bowler hats and umbrellas were essential components of men's attire at the beginning of the 20th century. In this beautiful still-life Léger shows us these everyday companions of the middle-class worker. The hat rests on a chair, the umbrella in a stand. The objects are isolated from one another and only connected by the colours and the spatial architecture of the interior setting. From the beginning to the middle of the 1920s, the work of Fernand Léger increasingly moved towards Purism. He rendered objects of everyday use – objects possessing a certain social value – with meticulous sharpness, outside of space and atmosphere, and detached from their use.
The shift of the central focus onto the object was the direct result Léger's engagement with the medium of film and its new technical possibilities. In 1924, together with Dudley Murphy, George Antheil and Man Ray, he created the important short film "Ballet mecanique", which was tantamount to an artistic revolution and attracted a great deal of attention. Both Dadaist and Surrealist in character, it had no explicit script, as explained in an introductory text at the beginning: "Le Ballet Mécanique a été composé par le peintre Fernand Léger en 1924. C’est le premier film sans scénario." The film starts with a cubistically arranged figure with cane and bowler hat with the inscription "Charlot présente le Ballet Mécanique". Charlot is the French name of the American social figure of the Tramp, a character used by Charlie Chaplin.
In the film, various movement sequences of figures, objects and machines in unusual perspectives are shown detached through multiple repetitions. In doing so, individual objects are deliberately portrayed in unusual clips.
In a lecture delivered before students at the Sorbonne in 1925, Léger declared: "In 1923-1924, I completed paintings whose important elements were objects set right outside any kind of atmosphere and unconnected with anything normal – objects isolated from the subjects I had abandoned. The subject in painting had already been destroyed, just as avant-garde film had destroyed the story line. I thought that the object, which had been neglected and poorly exploited, was the thing to replace the subject" (cited in: J. Cassou and J. Leymarie, Fernand Léger Drawings and Gouaches, New York, 1973, p. 87).
"In the years 1926 and 1927, Léger's main concern was to remove the object from any compulsion, from its familiar position in the centre, from the monolithic representation, and finally to free it completely. […] This placement of the object, even if at first sight it may seem arbitrary, is precisely balanced and worked out. […] Leger, as he put it, "turned the coffee pot upside down," and completely. He "removes the table which Braque and Picasso have retained," and removes the object from its "concentric situation, in order to bring it into a centrifugal position." (Georges Bauquier, in Schmalenbach/Moeller, Fernand Leger, Kunsthalle Munich, 1988/89, for no. 22).
There is also a pencil study of this subject from 1925 (Cassou/Leymarie 1973, no. 124, p. 92) and a painting (Bauquier vol. III, 1993, no. 462, p. 122) which, like the gouache, is dated 1926 and which was with Léonce Rosenberg and Heinz Berggruen before entering the A. Conger Goodyear Fund and then the collections of the Museum of Modern Art of New York in 1959, where it is still held today.
CHF 80 000 / 120 000 | (€ 82 470 / 123 710)
Vendu pour CHF 216 500 (frais inclus)
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