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Lot Essay
Le siphon and the related work on paper of the same name belong to a rare and important group of Purist-inspired still lifes that Fernand Léger created in 1924. At this time, the artist was moving between his classically inspired, monumental figure scenes, as well as a series of still lifes that returned to the theme of the ‘mechanical elements,’ which had dominated the artist’s work in the post-war years. Alongside these, Léger painted a group of works in which he deified the modern, manufactured object, portraying these symbols of 1920s society with slick, clear lines, and smooth, highly coloured forms to create paintings that distill the spirit of the era.
A gleaming embodiment of Roaring Twenties glamour, Le siphon is the larger of a pair of paintings that features a soda syphon (the other now resides in the Buffalo AKG Art Museum). Rarely for Léger, the exact source of his inspiration is documented. In December 1924, he told the journalist, Georges Charensol, ‘I am inspired by diagrams or mechanical elements, sometimes even the stereotypes of advertising, like in this drawing of a syphon, which I found in Le Matin’ (quoted in C. Green, Léger and the Avant-Garde, New Haven and London, 1976, p. 273). The image he was referring to has been identified as an advertisement for Campari, which featured in newspapers throughout this year. In this chic, closely cropped monochrome image, a man’s hand is seen holding the syphon as he sprays it into a cocktail glass. Léger lifted this motif directly into his own composition, even rendering the sliver of the white shirt and black suit that can just be seen around the man’s wrist. Behind the realistically rendered glass, syphon and hand, a geometric arrangement of forms hangs, offering a compelling visual contrast between Léger’s distinct form of abstraction, and realism.
In his adoption of these manufactured, commercially available objects, Léger was embracing the aesthetic of the Purist protagonists, Le Corbusier and Amédée Ozenfant. In the early 1920s, Léger had gradually shifted away from the cacophonous dissonance of his immediate post-war work. Inspired by the rappel à l'ordre, the ‘call to order,’ that dominated the Parisian avant-garde at this time, Léger embraced a more balanced and purified aesthetic in his art. While he remained true to his basic underlying principle of exploiting contrasts of form, he now did this with a different aim: to create an overriding sense of unity and order in his compositions. As a result, many of Léger’s still lifes, including the present work, feature a distinctly Purist sentiment.
Conceived in the late 1910s, Purism was defined by order, discipline and rationality—concepts that purposefully opposed the fragmentation and hermeticism of pre-war Cubism. Together, Le Corbusier and Ozenfant called for the rejection of nature in art, instead enlisting the stable, reliable qualities of anonymous, utilitarian and mass-produced objects as the subjects for their resolutely static and balanced still-life works. ‘The Purists attached a special value to certain objects as perfected functional designs, refined over centuries,’ Christopher Green has written, ‘they called such objects (wine bottles, glasses, musical instruments, for instance) “type-objects” and saw them as symbolic of an entire evolutionary process of adaptation in life’ (Cubism and its Enemies, New Haven and London, 1987, p. 75).
It was to these ‘type-objects’ that Léger turned when he began his series of Purist still lifes in 1924. Léger portrayed these industrially-produced objects, including, as in the present work, a syphon, but also a lamp or a glass, close up and as protagonists in their own right. In this way, these compositions echoed Léger’s belief that, ‘there are no categories or hierarchies of Beauty—this is the worst possible error. The Beautiful is everywhere; perhaps more in the arrangement of your saucepans in the white walls of your kitchen than in your eighteenth-century living room or in the official museums’ (‘The Machine Aesthetic: The Manufactured Object, The Artisan, and the Artist,’ in E. Fry, ed., Functions of Painting: Fernand Léger, London, 1973, pp. 52-53).
In contrast, however, to his Purist contemporaries, Léger was not solely inspired by the object itself, in this case, the syphon, but also by the overtly simplified, stylized pictorial language of the advertising with which it had been presented to the public. In the present work, Léger has not fragmented or distorted his protagonist, but has rendered it with a degree of realism that was inspired by the advert itself. As Green has explained, ‘It was not merely the syphon and glass as such that took his eye, but their simplistic representation in Le Matin; it was not merely the mass-produced “type-object” that mattered, but its character as mass-produced popular image in advertising. As striking as the objects is the severed hand, brother of the ubiquitous signpost pointing hand, the specific invention of advertising’ (op. cit., 1987, p. 273).
Another important influence that can be seen in Le siphon is Léger’s concurrent experience in the world of avant-garde cinema. In 1924, the same year that he painted Le siphon and the related works, the artist collaborated with American filmmaker, Dudley Murphy, to produce the film accompaniment to composer George Antheil’s Le ballet mécanique. In this film, a host of moving images featuring close-ups of objects were shown without context or narrative. This experience bolstered and confirmed many of Léger’s concurrent artistic ideas. Above all, he wrote, ‘that machines and fragments of them, that ordinary manufactured objects, have plastic possibilities… Contrasting objects, slow and rapid passages, rest and intensity—the whole film was constructed on that’ (‘Ballet Mécanique’ in E. Fry, op. cit., 1973, pp. 48-50).
Le siphon passed through a number of important collections before it was acquired by Peter Simon in 2002. It was initially owned by Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, whose gallery, which he opened in 1920 after his return to Paris from his exile in Switzerland during the First World War, was known as the Galerie Simon. It was acquired by the Chicago-based collectors, Maurice E. and Ruth S. Culberg. Together, the Culbergs collected a host of other twentieth-century works of art, including masterpieces by Piet Mondrian, Joan Miró, and Jean Dubuffet.
Similarly, the work on paper version of Le siphon also has a distinguished provenance. The legendary Cubist scholar and collector, Douglas Cooper, was the first owner of this study. Over the course of his life, Cooper amassed one of the most important collections of Cubist art, particularly focusing the key protagonists of the movement, Georges Braque, Juan Gris, Léger, and Pablo Picasso.
A gleaming embodiment of Roaring Twenties glamour, Le siphon is the larger of a pair of paintings that features a soda syphon (the other now resides in the Buffalo AKG Art Museum). Rarely for Léger, the exact source of his inspiration is documented. In December 1924, he told the journalist, Georges Charensol, ‘I am inspired by diagrams or mechanical elements, sometimes even the stereotypes of advertising, like in this drawing of a syphon, which I found in Le Matin’ (quoted in C. Green, Léger and the Avant-Garde, New Haven and London, 1976, p. 273). The image he was referring to has been identified as an advertisement for Campari, which featured in newspapers throughout this year. In this chic, closely cropped monochrome image, a man’s hand is seen holding the syphon as he sprays it into a cocktail glass. Léger lifted this motif directly into his own composition, even rendering the sliver of the white shirt and black suit that can just be seen around the man’s wrist. Behind the realistically rendered glass, syphon and hand, a geometric arrangement of forms hangs, offering a compelling visual contrast between Léger’s distinct form of abstraction, and realism.
In his adoption of these manufactured, commercially available objects, Léger was embracing the aesthetic of the Purist protagonists, Le Corbusier and Amédée Ozenfant. In the early 1920s, Léger had gradually shifted away from the cacophonous dissonance of his immediate post-war work. Inspired by the rappel à l'ordre, the ‘call to order,’ that dominated the Parisian avant-garde at this time, Léger embraced a more balanced and purified aesthetic in his art. While he remained true to his basic underlying principle of exploiting contrasts of form, he now did this with a different aim: to create an overriding sense of unity and order in his compositions. As a result, many of Léger’s still lifes, including the present work, feature a distinctly Purist sentiment.
Conceived in the late 1910s, Purism was defined by order, discipline and rationality—concepts that purposefully opposed the fragmentation and hermeticism of pre-war Cubism. Together, Le Corbusier and Ozenfant called for the rejection of nature in art, instead enlisting the stable, reliable qualities of anonymous, utilitarian and mass-produced objects as the subjects for their resolutely static and balanced still-life works. ‘The Purists attached a special value to certain objects as perfected functional designs, refined over centuries,’ Christopher Green has written, ‘they called such objects (wine bottles, glasses, musical instruments, for instance) “type-objects” and saw them as symbolic of an entire evolutionary process of adaptation in life’ (Cubism and its Enemies, New Haven and London, 1987, p. 75).
It was to these ‘type-objects’ that Léger turned when he began his series of Purist still lifes in 1924. Léger portrayed these industrially-produced objects, including, as in the present work, a syphon, but also a lamp or a glass, close up and as protagonists in their own right. In this way, these compositions echoed Léger’s belief that, ‘there are no categories or hierarchies of Beauty—this is the worst possible error. The Beautiful is everywhere; perhaps more in the arrangement of your saucepans in the white walls of your kitchen than in your eighteenth-century living room or in the official museums’ (‘The Machine Aesthetic: The Manufactured Object, The Artisan, and the Artist,’ in E. Fry, ed., Functions of Painting: Fernand Léger, London, 1973, pp. 52-53).
In contrast, however, to his Purist contemporaries, Léger was not solely inspired by the object itself, in this case, the syphon, but also by the overtly simplified, stylized pictorial language of the advertising with which it had been presented to the public. In the present work, Léger has not fragmented or distorted his protagonist, but has rendered it with a degree of realism that was inspired by the advert itself. As Green has explained, ‘It was not merely the syphon and glass as such that took his eye, but their simplistic representation in Le Matin; it was not merely the mass-produced “type-object” that mattered, but its character as mass-produced popular image in advertising. As striking as the objects is the severed hand, brother of the ubiquitous signpost pointing hand, the specific invention of advertising’ (op. cit., 1987, p. 273).
Another important influence that can be seen in Le siphon is Léger’s concurrent experience in the world of avant-garde cinema. In 1924, the same year that he painted Le siphon and the related works, the artist collaborated with American filmmaker, Dudley Murphy, to produce the film accompaniment to composer George Antheil’s Le ballet mécanique. In this film, a host of moving images featuring close-ups of objects were shown without context or narrative. This experience bolstered and confirmed many of Léger’s concurrent artistic ideas. Above all, he wrote, ‘that machines and fragments of them, that ordinary manufactured objects, have plastic possibilities… Contrasting objects, slow and rapid passages, rest and intensity—the whole film was constructed on that’ (‘Ballet Mécanique’ in E. Fry, op. cit., 1973, pp. 48-50).
Le siphon passed through a number of important collections before it was acquired by Peter Simon in 2002. It was initially owned by Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, whose gallery, which he opened in 1920 after his return to Paris from his exile in Switzerland during the First World War, was known as the Galerie Simon. It was acquired by the Chicago-based collectors, Maurice E. and Ruth S. Culberg. Together, the Culbergs collected a host of other twentieth-century works of art, including masterpieces by Piet Mondrian, Joan Miró, and Jean Dubuffet.
Similarly, the work on paper version of Le siphon also has a distinguished provenance. The legendary Cubist scholar and collector, Douglas Cooper, was the first owner of this study. Over the course of his life, Cooper amassed one of the most important collections of Cubist art, particularly focusing the key protagonists of the movement, Georges Braque, Juan Gris, Léger, and Pablo Picasso.