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拍品专文
In the early 1920s the painter Amade Ozenfant and his friend the architect and painter Charles Jeanneret (called Le Corbusier) promoted a classically-oriented distillation of cubist form they labeled Purism. They sought to unite art and design with science and mathematics, and by analyzing the human response to form and color, they believed they could create an art that was a sensation of mathematical precision, order and clarity.
The dealer Lonce Rosenberg exhibited Purist paintings at his Galerie L'Effort Moderne in 1921, as well as the grid-like compositions of Piet Mondrian, whose De Stijl movement represented a similar tendency in Dutch painting. Lger was also represented in the show, and had himself arrived at a mechanical style; however, in contrast to the others, he advocated a return to traditional subject matter, feeling a stronger commitment to a more inclusive view of life within his art.
Lger's flattened, polished forms of the early 1920s owe much to the Purist esprit nouveau, although Lger overlays his imagery in such a way that he creates a complex, disrupted surface and spatial ambiguities that Ozenfant and Jeanneret would not have allowed. At first glance the present work gives the impression of a monumental mechancial still-life set within some vast industrial interior, an effect reinforced by the presence of a window and a tree representing a landscape at upper left. This study is in fact closely related to the painting of a tug boat, Le remorqueur, 1922 (Bauquier, no. 341; private collection). The central cylindrical object is the boat's smokestack; the circular forms above it represent billows of smoke. The table-like shape at shape at lower left is one of the boat's railings; the row of circles below are the portholes in the boat's superstructure. The silhouette of a crew member stands at lower right.
The finished oil painting is done in a large horizontal format, in which the silhouette of the tug is clearly visible against the backdrop of a dock and factory buildings, with a landscape in the distance. In the present study, Lger quotes the trademark Opel, a German car-maker, a specific reference that he left out in the oil version.
The dealer Lonce Rosenberg exhibited Purist paintings at his Galerie L'Effort Moderne in 1921, as well as the grid-like compositions of Piet Mondrian, whose De Stijl movement represented a similar tendency in Dutch painting. Lger was also represented in the show, and had himself arrived at a mechanical style; however, in contrast to the others, he advocated a return to traditional subject matter, feeling a stronger commitment to a more inclusive view of life within his art.
Lger's flattened, polished forms of the early 1920s owe much to the Purist esprit nouveau, although Lger overlays his imagery in such a way that he creates a complex, disrupted surface and spatial ambiguities that Ozenfant and Jeanneret would not have allowed. At first glance the present work gives the impression of a monumental mechancial still-life set within some vast industrial interior, an effect reinforced by the presence of a window and a tree representing a landscape at upper left. This study is in fact closely related to the painting of a tug boat, Le remorqueur, 1922 (Bauquier, no. 341; private collection). The central cylindrical object is the boat's smokestack; the circular forms above it represent billows of smoke. The table-like shape at shape at lower left is one of the boat's railings; the row of circles below are the portholes in the boat's superstructure. The silhouette of a crew member stands at lower right.
The finished oil painting is done in a large horizontal format, in which the silhouette of the tug is clearly visible against the backdrop of a dock and factory buildings, with a landscape in the distance. In the present study, Lger quotes the trademark Opel, a German car-maker, a specific reference that he left out in the oil version.