Nature morte à la bouteille

The compositional elements found in Nature morte à la bouteille; a bottle, a basket, a book, and a branch, set against a green background, are representative of the renewed optimism felt across Europe after the end of the second world war. These bucolic references were to be developed still further by Léger with his Loisirs series. About this period Léger said, "I wanted to return to simplicity through a direct art, comprehensible by everyone"--as is borne out in the present work by the dominance of a small number of bold, pure colors: red, yellow, blue and green.

Nature morte à la bouteille was given by the artist circa 1950 to Jean Cassou, a great friend of Léger and, from 1947, the director of the (then) new Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris, where he remained until he retired in 1965. Cassou was also friends with Matisse, Bonnard, Rouault, Picasso, Braque and Brancusi, and as a result of this was able, during his tenure, to secure works by these artists (among others) for the museum that it would otherwise have had extreme difficulty in acquiring. Cassou wrote a number of books about Léger's work, and curated numerable exhibitions, including the 1956 show at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, and the 1971 retrospective at the Grand Palais. The present work bears witness to a friendship between the artist and the great museum director, critic and scholar.