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Lot Essay
Léger's interest in focusing on 'objects', which guided the development of his work during the late 1920s and 1930s, stemmed from his interest in the cinema and film-making techniques. He acknowledged that enlarged close-ups in motion pictures and the individualization of detail that it highlighted had influenced his artistic direction, a process set in motion by his work in 1924 with the American film-maker Dudley Murphy, which resulted in the short film Ballet mécanique. In the subsequent decade he worked on many still-lifes in which, as seen in the present lot, he had done away with conventional compositional cohesiveness, thereby 'liberating' objects from their spatial constraints and their accustomed 'subjective' context, and allowing them to appear to float in space -- a space defined by colour rather than by form and shape. Léger explained, 'I selected an object, chucked the table away. I put the object in space, minus perspective. Minus anything to hold it there. I then had to liberate colour to an even greater extent.' (quoted in P. de Francia, Fernand Léger, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1983, p. 111).
Léger has framed the composition in Le vase bleu with a grey-black ribbon that encircles and isolates the objects, which he has highlighted against a crimson and seemingly infinite background. Within this ribbon-frame, the elements are structured in such a way that the eye is drawn around the composition in a concentric circle, from the bottom right corner to the centre of the vase. The objects overlap, and in this manner depth has been achieved with deft simplicity and an easy lyricism. The pleasing unity of form is enhanced by the marine palette. The more neutral tone of the grey-blue and grey-green colouring in the surrounding objects act serves to underpin the contrasting vibrancy of the blue vase, emphasizing its presence, and pushing it to the front of the compositional plane. Léger had in fact noted that colour 'makes objects advance or recede in a painting' (in Fonctions de la peinture, Paris, 1965, p. 126). His choice of colours in this instance may reflect his involvement a few months earlier with a planned, but never executed, mural project for the pier of the French Line Shipping Company in New York harbour. Léger's designs for the project were based on nautical themes and he takes up a similar maritime palette here. Léger seems to bring the surface effortlessly to life, which perhaps owes its vitality to its suggestiveness of nautical elements, echoing of the movements of the sea, particularly in the eel-like twists of the tube at the bottom and the waves of the ribbon-frame, whose gentle flow is taken up in the stems of the flowers coming out of the vase at the heart of the picture.
Léger carried forward this interest in the depiction of the object, and in his later years he commonly employed even more jarring contrasts of colour and shape to enliven his compositions. He facilitated this development partly through his increasingly frequent use of gouache, a medium well suited to depicting broad, cleanly delineated and contrasting colour planes, an effect achieved with more ease than in oils, and with more opacity and body than was possible with ordinary watercolour.
Léger has framed the composition in Le vase bleu with a grey-black ribbon that encircles and isolates the objects, which he has highlighted against a crimson and seemingly infinite background. Within this ribbon-frame, the elements are structured in such a way that the eye is drawn around the composition in a concentric circle, from the bottom right corner to the centre of the vase. The objects overlap, and in this manner depth has been achieved with deft simplicity and an easy lyricism. The pleasing unity of form is enhanced by the marine palette. The more neutral tone of the grey-blue and grey-green colouring in the surrounding objects act serves to underpin the contrasting vibrancy of the blue vase, emphasizing its presence, and pushing it to the front of the compositional plane. Léger had in fact noted that colour 'makes objects advance or recede in a painting' (in Fonctions de la peinture, Paris, 1965, p. 126). His choice of colours in this instance may reflect his involvement a few months earlier with a planned, but never executed, mural project for the pier of the French Line Shipping Company in New York harbour. Léger's designs for the project were based on nautical themes and he takes up a similar maritime palette here. Léger seems to bring the surface effortlessly to life, which perhaps owes its vitality to its suggestiveness of nautical elements, echoing of the movements of the sea, particularly in the eel-like twists of the tube at the bottom and the waves of the ribbon-frame, whose gentle flow is taken up in the stems of the flowers coming out of the vase at the heart of the picture.
Léger carried forward this interest in the depiction of the object, and in his later years he commonly employed even more jarring contrasts of colour and shape to enliven his compositions. He facilitated this development partly through his increasingly frequent use of gouache, a medium well suited to depicting broad, cleanly delineated and contrasting colour planes, an effect achieved with more ease than in oils, and with more opacity and body than was possible with ordinary watercolour.