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拍品專文
During the years immediately preceding the beginning of the First World War in 1914, Léger was strongly influenced by Futurist theory, and believed the artist must find a pictorial equivalent to the dynamic of modern life. Like the Futurists, and in opposition to the views of most of the Cubists, he admired the Impressionists; he appreciated their involvement with subjects taken from contemporary life, and understood that they were the first to use subject matter not as an end in itself, as the academic realists had done, but as a means of creating a kind of painting in which formal pictorial values prevailed. Léger wrote "The Impressionists were the first to reject the absolute value of the subject and to consider its value as relative" (quoted in E.F. Fry, ed., Functions of Painting, by Fernand Léger, New York, 1965, p. 4).
The futurists advocated conflict and extreme forms of action, and welcomed the outbreak of the war. Léger did not sympathize with the jingoism, but nor did he shirk his duty. He served in the trenches during the war from 1914 until he was gassed on the Aisne front and hospitalized in the spring of 1917. He was present during the relentless slaughter at Verdun. He witnessed the mechanization of warfare: machine guns did much of the killing, tanks lumbered into battle and airplanes battled overhead. It was no less fascinating to observe the debris of smashed up equipment than it was to watch their brand-new replacements arrive from the factories in endless convoys. But most significantly, man himself had become a machine, one more wheel in the grinding gears of destruction and death.
Many of the artists who served on the front lines during the First World War were shattered by the experience, and when they returned to civilian life in 1918 they found the progressive art world of Paris greatly changed from when they left it. Picasso had turned to a more conservative treatment of the figure, and after nearly a decade of the spatial dislocations of Cubism his Neo-Classicism was very appealing. He still painted Cubist pictures, but together with Juan Gris and Gino Severini, he introduced a simpler, crystalline "classical" clarity into Cubism as well. Amédée Ozenfant and Le Corbusier (Charles-Edouard Jeanneret) were in the process of distilling their forms even further in anticipation of their "Purist" style. Even Severini, whose early war paintings extolled the dynamism of conflict, abandoned Futurism and turned to a more balanced, precise and static form of classical Cubism.
Léger's experiences during the wars did not discourage him from returning to the cylindrical, machine-like elements that he had introduced into his paintings before 1914. Instead, he saw the war as an irrefutable sign that society had broken with old values and witnessed the advent of a new modern reality. Léger later recounted to his dealer Léonce Rosenberg, "Three years without touching a paintbrush but contact with reality at its most violent, its most crude, the war made me mature, I'm not afraid to say so" (quoted in C. Green, op. cit., p. 96). In late 1917, when he finally resumed painting, Léger was poised to counter the classicism of the wartime Paris avant-garde with his own message of new subject matter represented in a dissonant and dynamic pictorial language.
La Partie de cartes (fig. 1), completed at the end of 1917 and exhibited the following year, served as an inaugural manifesto of Léger's postwar aims to his fellow artists and their public, and was all the more striking for its large scale, especially when compared to the small easel-size pictures of the classical Cubists. The soldiers seated around the table are composed of silvery tapered cylinders. These depersonalized automatons clank away like an infernal machine at their game, recognizable only from their helmets, medals and badges of rank.
Léger followed quickly with a series of pictures that herald the triumph of the machine in modern life. The painting Les Hélices, 1918 was instrumental in the transition from machine-man to the machine itself (fig. 2). Composed of struts, gears and tread- and propeller-like forms, the twisting helix hints at some mechanical process run amuck. "Working here, it seems, with his memories of aircraft crashed behind the lines on the Aisne front he arrived at a pictorial image whose scattered dissonant force is closely analogous with that especially of the 1916 gouache Paysage du front. It was from the eléments mécaniques of Les Hélices that Léger arrived at the most important of his disintegrated machine themes of 1918. This culminated in Le Moteur [the present work], an oil of public scale and conclusiveness" (ibid., pp. 147-148).
Le Moteur contains many of the mechanical elements seen in Les Hélices, and is based on the structure of an engine that drives a propeller, either in an airplane or ship. However, whereas Les Hélices is a machine in motion (or even in the midst of coming apart), Le Moteur is remarkable for its balance and stasis, where the gears, wheels and belts take on a monumental, almost heroic aspect. "Intimations of rotating movement only rarely challenge this framework and thus the forces of pictorial disintegration let loose by the destructiveness of Léger's approach to the subject are checked. Faced with the distinct threat of pictorial chaos a scattered, incoherent conflict of fragments Léger turns to a defensive pictorial strategy the discipline of a basically stable structure" (ibid.). A preparatory pencil drawing for this composition shows a ruled-in transfer grid, a practice that Léger had not hitherto required, but was now necessary in order to preserve the complex balance of elements during the enlargement of the composition (overlay).
If Léger aimed to provoke his viewers with his new imagery, he succeeded, and in a series of essays written over the next half-dozen years he explained his position, "The manufactured object is there, a polychrome absolute, clean and precise, beautiful in itself; and it is the most terrible competition the artist has ever been subjected to. I have never enjoyed copying a machine. I invent images from machines, as others have made landscapes from their imagination. For me the mechanical element is not a fixed position, an attitude, but a means of conveying a feeling of strength and power. It is necessary to retain what is useful in the subject and to extract from it the best part possible. I try to create a beautiful object with mechanical elements" (E.F. Fry, ed., op. cit., p. 62).
On the occasion of the Léger exhibition at the Kunsthaus Zurich (April-May 1933; the present work was not exhibited although illustrated in the article), Henri Laugier discussed the work of Léger in the 1933 issue of Cahiers d'Art:
L'Oeuvre de Fernand Léger constituera un des témoignages les plus évidents de la profonde révolution qui s'est accomplie dans la peinture au début du 20ème siècle... Révolution véritable... D'autres époques ont brillé d'un vif éclat...mais l'apport des quarante dernières années est...lourd d'avenir.
...au début de ce siècle une mutation brusque s'est produite dans les conceptions des peintres... le tableau peut et doit être une pure invention du peintre... Comprendre et admettre ce point de vue, c'est aussitôt sentir et aimer la peinture de Léger... forgeant son oeuvre, progressant avec une sérénité tranquille, Léger avance dans cette voie qui est la voie de demain, la grande voie royale de la peinture humaine, sensible, logique et créatrice.
The work of Fernand Léger will stand out as one of the most striking evidence of the profound revolution that took place in early 20th century painting... Truly a revolution... Other periods have shone very brightly but the contribution of the past forty years carries a heavy future.
...at the beginning of this century, an abrupt mutation took place in the creations of painters the painting can and must be a pure invention of the painter... to understand and admit this point of view... is to immediately feel and love Léger's painting building up his work progressing with calm serenity, Léger moves forward on this road which is the road to tomorrow, the great royal way to human painting, sensible, logical and creative. (H. Laugier, op. cit.)
Georges Bauquier, in his catalogue raisonné, states that the present painting (no. 138) is part of the same series as Le Moteur (no. 139) and Le Mécanicien (no. 140).
In a letter dated 27 July 1955, Sidney Janis approached René Gaffé with an offer to purchase the present painting.
(fig. 1) Fernand Léger, La Partie de cartes, 1917.
Rijksmuseum Kröller-Múller, Otterlo.
(fig. 2) Fernand Léger, Les Hélices, 1918.
The Museum of Modern Art, New York (Bequest of Katherine S. Dreier).
(fig. 3) Fernand Léger, Study for Le Moteur, central panel, 1918. Photo courtesy of Galerie Louise Leiris.
The futurists advocated conflict and extreme forms of action, and welcomed the outbreak of the war. Léger did not sympathize with the jingoism, but nor did he shirk his duty. He served in the trenches during the war from 1914 until he was gassed on the Aisne front and hospitalized in the spring of 1917. He was present during the relentless slaughter at Verdun. He witnessed the mechanization of warfare: machine guns did much of the killing, tanks lumbered into battle and airplanes battled overhead. It was no less fascinating to observe the debris of smashed up equipment than it was to watch their brand-new replacements arrive from the factories in endless convoys. But most significantly, man himself had become a machine, one more wheel in the grinding gears of destruction and death.
Many of the artists who served on the front lines during the First World War were shattered by the experience, and when they returned to civilian life in 1918 they found the progressive art world of Paris greatly changed from when they left it. Picasso had turned to a more conservative treatment of the figure, and after nearly a decade of the spatial dislocations of Cubism his Neo-Classicism was very appealing. He still painted Cubist pictures, but together with Juan Gris and Gino Severini, he introduced a simpler, crystalline "classical" clarity into Cubism as well. Amédée Ozenfant and Le Corbusier (Charles-Edouard Jeanneret) were in the process of distilling their forms even further in anticipation of their "Purist" style. Even Severini, whose early war paintings extolled the dynamism of conflict, abandoned Futurism and turned to a more balanced, precise and static form of classical Cubism.
Léger's experiences during the wars did not discourage him from returning to the cylindrical, machine-like elements that he had introduced into his paintings before 1914. Instead, he saw the war as an irrefutable sign that society had broken with old values and witnessed the advent of a new modern reality. Léger later recounted to his dealer Léonce Rosenberg, "Three years without touching a paintbrush but contact with reality at its most violent, its most crude, the war made me mature, I'm not afraid to say so" (quoted in C. Green, op. cit., p. 96). In late 1917, when he finally resumed painting, Léger was poised to counter the classicism of the wartime Paris avant-garde with his own message of new subject matter represented in a dissonant and dynamic pictorial language.
La Partie de cartes (fig. 1), completed at the end of 1917 and exhibited the following year, served as an inaugural manifesto of Léger's postwar aims to his fellow artists and their public, and was all the more striking for its large scale, especially when compared to the small easel-size pictures of the classical Cubists. The soldiers seated around the table are composed of silvery tapered cylinders. These depersonalized automatons clank away like an infernal machine at their game, recognizable only from their helmets, medals and badges of rank.
Léger followed quickly with a series of pictures that herald the triumph of the machine in modern life. The painting Les Hélices, 1918 was instrumental in the transition from machine-man to the machine itself (fig. 2). Composed of struts, gears and tread- and propeller-like forms, the twisting helix hints at some mechanical process run amuck. "Working here, it seems, with his memories of aircraft crashed behind the lines on the Aisne front he arrived at a pictorial image whose scattered dissonant force is closely analogous with that especially of the 1916 gouache Paysage du front. It was from the eléments mécaniques of Les Hélices that Léger arrived at the most important of his disintegrated machine themes of 1918. This culminated in Le Moteur [the present work], an oil of public scale and conclusiveness" (ibid., pp. 147-148).
Le Moteur contains many of the mechanical elements seen in Les Hélices, and is based on the structure of an engine that drives a propeller, either in an airplane or ship. However, whereas Les Hélices is a machine in motion (or even in the midst of coming apart), Le Moteur is remarkable for its balance and stasis, where the gears, wheels and belts take on a monumental, almost heroic aspect. "Intimations of rotating movement only rarely challenge this framework and thus the forces of pictorial disintegration let loose by the destructiveness of Léger's approach to the subject are checked. Faced with the distinct threat of pictorial chaos a scattered, incoherent conflict of fragments Léger turns to a defensive pictorial strategy the discipline of a basically stable structure" (ibid.). A preparatory pencil drawing for this composition shows a ruled-in transfer grid, a practice that Léger had not hitherto required, but was now necessary in order to preserve the complex balance of elements during the enlargement of the composition (overlay).
If Léger aimed to provoke his viewers with his new imagery, he succeeded, and in a series of essays written over the next half-dozen years he explained his position, "The manufactured object is there, a polychrome absolute, clean and precise, beautiful in itself; and it is the most terrible competition the artist has ever been subjected to. I have never enjoyed copying a machine. I invent images from machines, as others have made landscapes from their imagination. For me the mechanical element is not a fixed position, an attitude, but a means of conveying a feeling of strength and power. It is necessary to retain what is useful in the subject and to extract from it the best part possible. I try to create a beautiful object with mechanical elements" (E.F. Fry, ed., op. cit., p. 62).
On the occasion of the Léger exhibition at the Kunsthaus Zurich (April-May 1933; the present work was not exhibited although illustrated in the article), Henri Laugier discussed the work of Léger in the 1933 issue of Cahiers d'Art:
L'Oeuvre de Fernand Léger constituera un des témoignages les plus évidents de la profonde révolution qui s'est accomplie dans la peinture au début du 20ème siècle... Révolution véritable... D'autres époques ont brillé d'un vif éclat...mais l'apport des quarante dernières années est...lourd d'avenir.
...au début de ce siècle une mutation brusque s'est produite dans les conceptions des peintres... le tableau peut et doit être une pure invention du peintre... Comprendre et admettre ce point de vue, c'est aussitôt sentir et aimer la peinture de Léger... forgeant son oeuvre, progressant avec une sérénité tranquille, Léger avance dans cette voie qui est la voie de demain, la grande voie royale de la peinture humaine, sensible, logique et créatrice.
The work of Fernand Léger will stand out as one of the most striking evidence of the profound revolution that took place in early 20th century painting... Truly a revolution... Other periods have shone very brightly but the contribution of the past forty years carries a heavy future.
...at the beginning of this century, an abrupt mutation took place in the creations of painters the painting can and must be a pure invention of the painter... to understand and admit this point of view... is to immediately feel and love Léger's painting building up his work progressing with calm serenity, Léger moves forward on this road which is the road to tomorrow, the great royal way to human painting, sensible, logical and creative. (H. Laugier, op. cit.)
Georges Bauquier, in his catalogue raisonné, states that the present painting (no. 138) is part of the same series as Le Moteur (no. 139) and Le Mécanicien (no. 140).
In a letter dated 27 July 1955, Sidney Janis approached René Gaffé with an offer to purchase the present painting.
(fig. 1) Fernand Léger, La Partie de cartes, 1917.
Rijksmuseum Kröller-Múller, Otterlo.
(fig. 2) Fernand Léger, Les Hélices, 1918.
The Museum of Modern Art, New York (Bequest of Katherine S. Dreier).
(fig. 3) Fernand Léger, Study for Le Moteur, central panel, 1918. Photo courtesy of Galerie Louise Leiris.