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Lot Essay
Fernand Léger, who was normally preoccupied with mechanical elements taken from modern urban life, turned to the subject of the rural landscape in 1929, his first sustained effort in this genre since his series of paysages animés of 1921. This interest grew out of Léger's stays at his family's farm in Normandy, during which he enjoyed drawing simple objects that he encountered during his daily walks, such as stones, thistles, leaves or fragments of bark. Jean Cassou and Jean Leymarie have noted Léger's newfound "fascination with the object" during this period: "Léger was now breaking away from the world of machines and turning toward natural forms which were essentially vegetable, mineral, animal" (Fernand Léger Drawings and Gouaches, London, 1973, p. 115). The artist was especially fond of trees, whose structural size and strength made them the natural counterpart of the machine; he moreover relished the contrasts between the organic forms and origins of trees, and the man-made design and construction of industrial products. Léger declared, "I adore trees. I can't rest when there are trees around me. I'm enormously tempted to paint them, but I know I shall never be able to paint them as I see them. How could I ever give them more expressiveness than they have? I know I'm beaten before I start" (quoted in ibid.).
Léger, literally working from the ground up, constructed his landscapes out of these basic natural forms. In the same way that he precisely depicted man-made objects set against a flattened pictorial space, he painted his landscape components by assembling disparate natural objects, and drawing attention to the contrasts of their shapes and surfaces. At first the space in his landscape backdrops was derived from the flatness of Purism, as if he were undertaking still-life compositions, but he increasingly turned to softer, shaded and undulating forms which evoked the rolling contours of hills and dales, as seen here. By employing a horizon, he created a sense of distance, while retaining the modernist conception of pictorial space, which is essentially flat.
Léger found his precedents for the earlier paysages animés in Corot and Poussin, whose paintings had been taken out of protective wartime storage and re-installed in the main galleries of the Louvre in 1920. The same influences are apparent here as well: the example of Poussin may be detected in the classically modeled forms of the landscape elements, and Corot in the softer passages, and in the silvery green tonality that pervades the scene.
The present painting is one in a series of landscapes (Bauquier, nos. 785-790) which Léger probably executed during the spring of 1931. The largest picture in this group, Composition (Les clés; Bauquier, no. 789), showing Léger's house keys superimposed on the landscape motifs, appears in a photograph that the American painter and collector Albert E. Gallatin took in Léger's studio during a visit in either April or May 1931 (fig. 1). These landscapes comprise a peaceful, idyllic respite in Léger's output of this period, which was followed by the artist's first trip to the United States in September 1931. Léger stayed in New York through early December, with a trip to Chicago, during which he eagerly absorbed a barrage of new urban impressions, which he described as "the most colossal spectacle in the world a natural beauty, like the elements of nature; like trees mountains, flowers" (quoted in "New York," 1931, Functions of Painting, New York, 1973, pp. 84 and 85).
(fig. 1) Photograph of Léger in his studio, spring 1931, taken by A. E. Gallatin.
Léger, literally working from the ground up, constructed his landscapes out of these basic natural forms. In the same way that he precisely depicted man-made objects set against a flattened pictorial space, he painted his landscape components by assembling disparate natural objects, and drawing attention to the contrasts of their shapes and surfaces. At first the space in his landscape backdrops was derived from the flatness of Purism, as if he were undertaking still-life compositions, but he increasingly turned to softer, shaded and undulating forms which evoked the rolling contours of hills and dales, as seen here. By employing a horizon, he created a sense of distance, while retaining the modernist conception of pictorial space, which is essentially flat.
Léger found his precedents for the earlier paysages animés in Corot and Poussin, whose paintings had been taken out of protective wartime storage and re-installed in the main galleries of the Louvre in 1920. The same influences are apparent here as well: the example of Poussin may be detected in the classically modeled forms of the landscape elements, and Corot in the softer passages, and in the silvery green tonality that pervades the scene.
The present painting is one in a series of landscapes (Bauquier, nos. 785-790) which Léger probably executed during the spring of 1931. The largest picture in this group, Composition (Les clés; Bauquier, no. 789), showing Léger's house keys superimposed on the landscape motifs, appears in a photograph that the American painter and collector Albert E. Gallatin took in Léger's studio during a visit in either April or May 1931 (fig. 1). These landscapes comprise a peaceful, idyllic respite in Léger's output of this period, which was followed by the artist's first trip to the United States in September 1931. Léger stayed in New York through early December, with a trip to Chicago, during which he eagerly absorbed a barrage of new urban impressions, which he described as "the most colossal spectacle in the world a natural beauty, like the elements of nature; like trees mountains, flowers" (quoted in "New York," 1931, Functions of Painting, New York, 1973, pp. 84 and 85).
(fig. 1) Photograph of Léger in his studio, spring 1931, taken by A. E. Gallatin.