Nature morte à la guitare

During the mid-1920's, Léger's sought to marry architectural clarity to images of modern life, a development set in motion by his exposure to Léonce Rosenberg's De Stijl exhibition at the Galerie l'Effort Moderne in November 1923, resulted in still-lifes such as the present work, in which complex, quasi-Cubist compositions are joined by a stolid presentation of objects and an uninflected application of paint. The almost mathematical precision and clarity of these paintings can also be related to works by the co-founders of Purism, Ozenfant and Le Corbusier, who sought to "solve" the problems of Cubism by reintroducing the integrity of individual objects, a proposal wholly contrary to the earlier movement's dissolution of solid forms.

Nature morte à la guitare exemplifies the range of concerns that Léger embraced in 1926, employing a more lyrical use of light and modelling than in those works of the previous two years when he had been more strictly under the influence of the De Stijl movement. What Léger called "the new lyricism of the transformed object... a lyricism in which color, form and object play equal parts... I also found the fragments of objects useful; by isolating them one personalizes them. This process led me to consider the happening of objectivity as a new, very topical value... The way in which one looks at objects and their parts involves a totally new realism (quoted in W. Schmalenbach, Fernand Léger, New York, 1976, p. 126).