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Lot Essay
Filled with an intriguing play of forms, figures and objects, Les trois personnages devant le jardin is a rich example of Fernand Léger’s distinctive style during the early 1920s. The figure compositions from this period mark a significant turning point in the evolution of Léger’s oeuvre during the years immediately following the end of the First World War, as the artist navigated the many cross-currents of post-war modernism. By the time Léger received a medical discharge from the French army in early 1917, ending his front-line service in the war, it had been over three years since he had picked up a paintbrush. Many developments had transpired in the Parisian and wider European art world in the interim, from later synthetic cubism and constructivism, to abstraction and neo-plasticism. Perhaps most notably, a new interest in classicism was gaining traction among the avant-garde, transforming their work with its emphasis on clarity, purity and monumentality. Eager to make up for lost time, Léger plunged himself into his work once again, experimenting, investigating, testing and syncretizing various pictorial ideas he observed around him, to create his own unique painterly language.
When he first resumed painting in 1917, Léger had remained dedicated to the brash, anti-order convictions of his earlier, cubist-inspired work. He viewed the Great War as an irrefutable sign that society had broken with the outworn values of the past and was now entering a new, genuinely modern reality. He persisted in countering the increasingly conservative, and at times even escapist classicism of the post-war Paris school by advocating the use of wholly contemporary and cosmopolitan subject matter, which he cast in uncompromisingly dissonant and dynamic pictorial forms. He simply painted, as he put it, “what was going on around me” (quoted in D. Kosinki, ed., Fernand Léger: The Rhythm of Modern Life, exh. cat., Kunstmuseum Basel, 1994, p. 68). Gradually, however, Léger had begun to reconsider his position regarding this classicizing trend—le rappel à l’ordre (“the call to order”) as it was known. As a result, his paintings from the opening years of the decade sought to meld tradition and modernity, creating a concise synthesis of seemingly divergent idioms—declaring it “an epoch of contrasts,” Léger explained that with these works, he was “consistent with my own time” (quoted in E.F. Fry, ed., Fernand Léger: The Functions of Painting, New York, 1973, p. 30).
Central to this new approach within Léger’s painting was the reappearance of the human figure. During the late teens, Léger had concentrated on the mechanical aspects of modern life in the city, a world of architecture, engineering, machines and commercial activity. From 1920 onward, however, he shifted his focus to the figure, transferring his mise-en-scène to the domestic interior. “I had broken down the human body,” Léger explained, referring to his earlier work, “so I set about putting it together again and rediscovering the human face... I wanted a rest, a breathing space. After the dynamism of the mechanical period, I felt the need for the staticity of large figures” (quoted in C. Lanchner, Fernand Léger, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1998, p. 188). The new, genuinely modern conception of the figure must be massive and monumental, possess substance and solidity, Léger decided, so that it might properly assume and hold its place in the mechanical environment.
Léger’s revised approach to the figure during this period was greatly influenced by his re-immersion in the art of the Old Masters. The Parisian museums had been closed during the war, and their collections placed in storage for safe-keeping. Beginning in 1919, the galleries at the Louvre were gradually re-installed, as were treasures from the trove of medieval art in the Musée de Cluny. The return of these artworks to public view gave further impetus to the Neoclassical revival sweeping through Paris, allowing artists to study first-hand the art of the past and absorb its central tenets. Léger was amazed at the ability of the manuscript illuminators and the primitivist painters of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries to create figures that projected a powerful pictorial presence, placed as they were against flat, patterned backgrounds that made minimal use of developed perspective.
He was similarly interested in the rounded and full-bodied forms seen in the figures of the French master Jean Fouquet, as well as the Le Nain brothers, whose La famille de paysans dans un intérieur quickly became a favorite among modern artists for the classic simplicity of its realism, and the straightforward and non-sentimentalized treatment that the brothers had accorded their subject. Through these examples, Léger realized that genre painting, which the Impressionists and successive modernists had dismissed, was actually still viable for a painter of the twentieth century, provided that its elements were drawn strictly from modern life and were depicted without the overlay of sentiment. This is the task he set for himself, which he would undertake by treating the human figure, as he stated, “not as a sentimental element, but solely as a plastic element” (quoted in J. Cassou and J. Leymarie, Fernand Léger: Drawings and Gouaches, London, 1973, p. 46).
Painted in 1922, Les trois personnages devant le jardin is a masterful example of this new direction in Léger’s art. The setting appears to be a light-filled solarium, its expansive windows and open French doors revealing the rolling hills and verdant greenery of a rural landscape. Using the door panels as markers, Léger has divided the composition into three distinct sections, in the manner of a medieval altarpiece, comprising a central panel and two wings. Three figures occupy the central section, crowded into the doorway, their forms overlapping one another as they hover on the threshold between the garden and the domestic interior. A collection of simple, quotidian furniture surrounds them in this space—tables crowded with silverware and food, sideboards decorated with lamps and potted plants, colorfully patterned cabinets and chairs—each addition a reflection of the everyday rhythms and activities of modern life. As crammed as the composition may appear in places, each object, furnishing and figure has been clearly delineated and occupies a space of its own, allowing a lively interplay of contrasting shapes, forms and colors across the canvas.
Léger painted five compositions within this setting over the course of 1922, altering the number of figures, the selection of objects, their relationships to one another, and the color scheme in each canvas (Bauquier, nos. 331-335). While in the initial Etude pour la femme et l’enfant (Bauquier, no. 331; Private collection) he focuses solely on the reclining female figure at the center of the configuration, in La liseuse, mère et enfant and La femme et l’enfant (Bauquier, nos. 334 and 335; Private collection and Kunstmuseum, Basel) the woman is joined by a young child, who she appears to be reading to from the open book in the foreground. In the present work and its closest companion Personnages dans un jardin (Bauquier, no. 332; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), Léger expands the composition to include a third figure, positioned behind the reclining woman. In both of these scenes, the identity of these three protagonists appear deliberately ambiguous—apart from the central figure, their genders and precise age remain unclear. As a result, the meaning of Les trois personnages devant le jardin remains something of a mystery—the work may describe a family of father, mother and child, captured in an ordinary moment in the middle of the day, or, a more interesting reading would presume these figures to be a woman symbolically evolving through the stages of life, represented here by three different generations.
When he first resumed painting in 1917, Léger had remained dedicated to the brash, anti-order convictions of his earlier, cubist-inspired work. He viewed the Great War as an irrefutable sign that society had broken with the outworn values of the past and was now entering a new, genuinely modern reality. He persisted in countering the increasingly conservative, and at times even escapist classicism of the post-war Paris school by advocating the use of wholly contemporary and cosmopolitan subject matter, which he cast in uncompromisingly dissonant and dynamic pictorial forms. He simply painted, as he put it, “what was going on around me” (quoted in D. Kosinki, ed., Fernand Léger: The Rhythm of Modern Life, exh. cat., Kunstmuseum Basel, 1994, p. 68). Gradually, however, Léger had begun to reconsider his position regarding this classicizing trend—le rappel à l’ordre (“the call to order”) as it was known. As a result, his paintings from the opening years of the decade sought to meld tradition and modernity, creating a concise synthesis of seemingly divergent idioms—declaring it “an epoch of contrasts,” Léger explained that with these works, he was “consistent with my own time” (quoted in E.F. Fry, ed., Fernand Léger: The Functions of Painting, New York, 1973, p. 30).
Central to this new approach within Léger’s painting was the reappearance of the human figure. During the late teens, Léger had concentrated on the mechanical aspects of modern life in the city, a world of architecture, engineering, machines and commercial activity. From 1920 onward, however, he shifted his focus to the figure, transferring his mise-en-scène to the domestic interior. “I had broken down the human body,” Léger explained, referring to his earlier work, “so I set about putting it together again and rediscovering the human face... I wanted a rest, a breathing space. After the dynamism of the mechanical period, I felt the need for the staticity of large figures” (quoted in C. Lanchner, Fernand Léger, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1998, p. 188). The new, genuinely modern conception of the figure must be massive and monumental, possess substance and solidity, Léger decided, so that it might properly assume and hold its place in the mechanical environment.
Léger’s revised approach to the figure during this period was greatly influenced by his re-immersion in the art of the Old Masters. The Parisian museums had been closed during the war, and their collections placed in storage for safe-keeping. Beginning in 1919, the galleries at the Louvre were gradually re-installed, as were treasures from the trove of medieval art in the Musée de Cluny. The return of these artworks to public view gave further impetus to the Neoclassical revival sweeping through Paris, allowing artists to study first-hand the art of the past and absorb its central tenets. Léger was amazed at the ability of the manuscript illuminators and the primitivist painters of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries to create figures that projected a powerful pictorial presence, placed as they were against flat, patterned backgrounds that made minimal use of developed perspective.
He was similarly interested in the rounded and full-bodied forms seen in the figures of the French master Jean Fouquet, as well as the Le Nain brothers, whose La famille de paysans dans un intérieur quickly became a favorite among modern artists for the classic simplicity of its realism, and the straightforward and non-sentimentalized treatment that the brothers had accorded their subject. Through these examples, Léger realized that genre painting, which the Impressionists and successive modernists had dismissed, was actually still viable for a painter of the twentieth century, provided that its elements were drawn strictly from modern life and were depicted without the overlay of sentiment. This is the task he set for himself, which he would undertake by treating the human figure, as he stated, “not as a sentimental element, but solely as a plastic element” (quoted in J. Cassou and J. Leymarie, Fernand Léger: Drawings and Gouaches, London, 1973, p. 46).
Painted in 1922, Les trois personnages devant le jardin is a masterful example of this new direction in Léger’s art. The setting appears to be a light-filled solarium, its expansive windows and open French doors revealing the rolling hills and verdant greenery of a rural landscape. Using the door panels as markers, Léger has divided the composition into three distinct sections, in the manner of a medieval altarpiece, comprising a central panel and two wings. Three figures occupy the central section, crowded into the doorway, their forms overlapping one another as they hover on the threshold between the garden and the domestic interior. A collection of simple, quotidian furniture surrounds them in this space—tables crowded with silverware and food, sideboards decorated with lamps and potted plants, colorfully patterned cabinets and chairs—each addition a reflection of the everyday rhythms and activities of modern life. As crammed as the composition may appear in places, each object, furnishing and figure has been clearly delineated and occupies a space of its own, allowing a lively interplay of contrasting shapes, forms and colors across the canvas.
Léger painted five compositions within this setting over the course of 1922, altering the number of figures, the selection of objects, their relationships to one another, and the color scheme in each canvas (Bauquier, nos. 331-335). While in the initial Etude pour la femme et l’enfant (Bauquier, no. 331; Private collection) he focuses solely on the reclining female figure at the center of the configuration, in La liseuse, mère et enfant and La femme et l’enfant (Bauquier, nos. 334 and 335; Private collection and Kunstmuseum, Basel) the woman is joined by a young child, who she appears to be reading to from the open book in the foreground. In the present work and its closest companion Personnages dans un jardin (Bauquier, no. 332; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), Léger expands the composition to include a third figure, positioned behind the reclining woman. In both of these scenes, the identity of these three protagonists appear deliberately ambiguous—apart from the central figure, their genders and precise age remain unclear. As a result, the meaning of Les trois personnages devant le jardin remains something of a mystery—the work may describe a family of father, mother and child, captured in an ordinary moment in the middle of the day, or, a more interesting reading would presume these figures to be a woman symbolically evolving through the stages of life, represented here by three different generations.