La Grande Parade

The present gouache belongs to the cycle of works entitled La Grande Parade which Léger worked on during the last fifteen years of his life. It shows one stage in the painstaking process by which Léger developed the themes of these cycles. He admitted "I study everything ponderously. I work very slowly indeed. I am unable to improvise. The more I watch myself, the more I see that I am a classic. I do a long preparatory work. First I do a quantity of drawings, then I do gouaches, and lastly I pass on to the canvas." In another context he said "If I have drawn circus people, acrobats, clowns, jugglers, it is because I have taken an interest in their work for thirty years. Ever since I designed cubist costumes for the Fratellini, I did a quantity of drawings and studies for Le Grande Parade. For I am a classic: if my first drawings are off the cuff, I am aware of the media that I shall employ....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" (see W. Schmalenbach, Fernand Léger, New York, 1976, p. 166).

Léger inscribed the back of the gouache 'H2' as an indication that it is his second state working of the subject. This is also how this version of La Grande Parade was described in Cahiers d'Art in 1954.

Gouaches from the Grande Parade series are held in several celebrated collections, particularly in the Musée Fernand Léger, Biot, and the Collection Aimé Maeght, Paris.

To be included in the catalogue raisonné of Léger's gouaches currently being prepared by Georges Bauquier.