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Lot Essay
Painted in 1938-39, Grande nature morte is a whimsical painting filled with interlocking forms and amorphous masses, resulting in a musicality and rhythm which displays Léger's preoccupation with the perfect harmony of color and form. Although Léger was never affiliated with the Surrealists, he had contact and indeed friendships with many of the movement's members. It was through their indirect influence that Léger's art during the 1930s had begun to show an increasing regard for abstraction. The rappel à l'ordre ("call to order") that had followed the chaos of the First World War, summoning artists to return to classical values of form and humanism, had marked his work for a long time. However, by 1938, this call to order had long since ceased to influence his painting.
Léger reacted to this change in different ways, on the one hand creating works that showed everyday scenes in his trademark manner and on the other beginning to explore with a new sense of freedom ideas of form, color and, more importantly, of dynamism. Speaking of his work at this time Léger stated, "I dispersed my objects in space and kept them all together while at the same time making them radiate out from the surface of the picture. A tricky interplay of harmonies and rhythms made up of background and surface colors, guidelines, distances and oppositions" (quoted in W. Schmalenbach, Fernand Léger, New York, 1976, p. 32). Grande nature morte, with its exuberant explosion of planes, lines and forms, is a work pulsating with rythem and energy, whose dynamism displays an ongoing process of experimentation and discovery by an artist who had always been preoccupied with movement.
Comparative:
Léger in his studio 1939-1940.
Léger reacted to this change in different ways, on the one hand creating works that showed everyday scenes in his trademark manner and on the other beginning to explore with a new sense of freedom ideas of form, color and, more importantly, of dynamism. Speaking of his work at this time Léger stated, "I dispersed my objects in space and kept them all together while at the same time making them radiate out from the surface of the picture. A tricky interplay of harmonies and rhythms made up of background and surface colors, guidelines, distances and oppositions" (quoted in W. Schmalenbach, Fernand Léger, New York, 1976, p. 32). Grande nature morte, with its exuberant explosion of planes, lines and forms, is a work pulsating with rythem and energy, whose dynamism displays an ongoing process of experimentation and discovery by an artist who had always been preoccupied with movement.
Comparative:
Léger in his studio 1939-1940.