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Lot Essay
*This lot may be exempt from sales tax as set forth in the Sales Tax Notice in the back of the catalogue.
Painted in 1923, Nature morte's geometric forms are filled with an intense purity. Léger has taken the visual idiom of the machine age and used it to describe a domestic interior. The manner in which Léger has painted an almost timeless theme--fruit, a table, a landscape painting in the background is unassailably modern.
The idea of painting the real and everyday world using the visual language of modernity was particularly appealing to Léger in the wake of the First World War. He had spent time on the front and witnessed the madness of the war in which machines had been used to kill people in hitherto unimaginable numbers. The idea of the subsequent rappel à l'ordre ("call to order") came as a welcome antidote to this chaos. Machines, despite their role in the war, could in fact be viewed as a source of hope. As such, it made sense to Purists such as Le Corbusier, Ozenfant, and later Léger, to see the world in all its modern exigencies--in the terms of the machine.
There is a demonstrative sense of construction in Nature morte. The cylinders and planes that comprise this picture are indeed "high-tech", although they join to create an image of a simple table, fruit and walls. Léger has here found a means of portraying the world through modern eyes. He used the flatness and simplicity of the composition, the reduced manner in which the components have been rendered as a counterweight to the increasing clutter of Cubism, which Léger felt was no longer connected to the visual world. In Nature morte, Léger has found a means of combining a modern and pseudo-mechanical visual idiom with the organic volumes of the hills in the landscape and the pears in the bowl, creating a dynamic contrast between the surfaces he has represented, and managing to make both fruit and landscape tangible in their own right.
Although Léger was an innovator, he was not an iconoclast, and it is therefore a deliberate choice that he has made in selecting still life as a subject matter. While his means constitute an assault on tradition, they also reinvigorate, through his new visual idiom, a conventional artistic tradition. Léger has not insulted the art of the past, but instead has found a new form for it, a new path to the present and future. Perhaps it was in reference to this that Léger explicitly painted a landscape in the upper left quadrant of the present work, indicating that there is still a place for the traditional in the modern world, so long as it is presented in a guise that is true to its times. Nature morte is a still-life painting evoking both domestic order and the brave new world of modernism, thereby capable of impressing and rallying the post-war and avant-garde.
Painted in 1923, Nature morte's geometric forms are filled with an intense purity. Léger has taken the visual idiom of the machine age and used it to describe a domestic interior. The manner in which Léger has painted an almost timeless theme--fruit, a table, a landscape painting in the background is unassailably modern.
The idea of painting the real and everyday world using the visual language of modernity was particularly appealing to Léger in the wake of the First World War. He had spent time on the front and witnessed the madness of the war in which machines had been used to kill people in hitherto unimaginable numbers. The idea of the subsequent rappel à l'ordre ("call to order") came as a welcome antidote to this chaos. Machines, despite their role in the war, could in fact be viewed as a source of hope. As such, it made sense to Purists such as Le Corbusier, Ozenfant, and later Léger, to see the world in all its modern exigencies--in the terms of the machine.
There is a demonstrative sense of construction in Nature morte. The cylinders and planes that comprise this picture are indeed "high-tech", although they join to create an image of a simple table, fruit and walls. Léger has here found a means of portraying the world through modern eyes. He used the flatness and simplicity of the composition, the reduced manner in which the components have been rendered as a counterweight to the increasing clutter of Cubism, which Léger felt was no longer connected to the visual world. In Nature morte, Léger has found a means of combining a modern and pseudo-mechanical visual idiom with the organic volumes of the hills in the landscape and the pears in the bowl, creating a dynamic contrast between the surfaces he has represented, and managing to make both fruit and landscape tangible in their own right.
Although Léger was an innovator, he was not an iconoclast, and it is therefore a deliberate choice that he has made in selecting still life as a subject matter. While his means constitute an assault on tradition, they also reinvigorate, through his new visual idiom, a conventional artistic tradition. Léger has not insulted the art of the past, but instead has found a new form for it, a new path to the present and future. Perhaps it was in reference to this that Léger explicitly painted a landscape in the upper left quadrant of the present work, indicating that there is still a place for the traditional in the modern world, so long as it is presented in a guise that is true to its times. Nature morte is a still-life painting evoking both domestic order and the brave new world of modernism, thereby capable of impressing and rallying the post-war and avant-garde.