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Lot Essay
Léger's La racine grise reflects the powerful continuity in the artist's work. Painted during the year of the artist's post-war return to France from America, and simultaneous with the development of his famous Plongeurs theme, La racine grise extends the formal innovations Léger first explored in the late 1920s. As Peter de Francia has observed:
Increasingly in Léger's 1927 paintings, objects which had previously appeared as though bonded to the flat vertical and horizontal elevations of his pictures were allowed to float free. In a painting of that year, the Nature morte au coquillage for instance, it is the shell in the upper part of the composition which appears as unattached. Other sections of the picture remain static. If the splendid 1927 Nature morte au bras levé still retains a centered axis, the positioning and overall form of the arm hints at its freedom and autonomy in relation to the other more stable elements contained within the composition. The Profil noir of 1928, in which the previous 'mural' armatures have been virtually abandoned, accentuated this tendency. Within the next two years static geometric elements or immobilized objects were virtually excluded from his work (in Fernand Leger, London, 1983, p. 107).
In La racine grise this tendency is fully manifest as a new compositional dictum. Here not one but all of the elements of the picture float, unhinged to any details in the blank white negative space. Moreover, the seemingly naturalistic racine gris is spatially aligned with assorted non-objective shapes with no planar distinction between them. This commensuration of subjects, the representational and non-, is typical of his mid 40s work.
In Léger's still-life of the mid 1940s a 'Léger line' or a 'Léger form' become instantly recognizable. To a greater degree than before each part of his pictorial vocabulary, affirmative and individual as it is, becomes interchangeable within his work...The elements of landscape, still life and figures were amalgamated; Léger now sought their synthesis. One of the methods which he used to achieve this was an enormous strengthening of colour, often described by him as 'a formidable raw material, as indispensable to life as fire or water' (ibid., p. 134).
La racine grise is not only stylistically but historically emblematic as it was acquired directly from the personal collection of Paule and Adrien Maeght, descendants of Léger's primary dealer of the post-war era, Aimé Maeght. A publisher as well as a gallery owner, Maeght collaborated with Georges Bauquier on the multi-volume catalogue raisonné of Léger's work. This work was among the selection of works in the Maeght private collection that was not donated the Fondation Maeght which opened to the public in 1963.
Increasingly in Léger's 1927 paintings, objects which had previously appeared as though bonded to the flat vertical and horizontal elevations of his pictures were allowed to float free. In a painting of that year, the Nature morte au coquillage for instance, it is the shell in the upper part of the composition which appears as unattached. Other sections of the picture remain static. If the splendid 1927 Nature morte au bras levé still retains a centered axis, the positioning and overall form of the arm hints at its freedom and autonomy in relation to the other more stable elements contained within the composition. The Profil noir of 1928, in which the previous 'mural' armatures have been virtually abandoned, accentuated this tendency. Within the next two years static geometric elements or immobilized objects were virtually excluded from his work (in Fernand Leger, London, 1983, p. 107).
In La racine grise this tendency is fully manifest as a new compositional dictum. Here not one but all of the elements of the picture float, unhinged to any details in the blank white negative space. Moreover, the seemingly naturalistic racine gris is spatially aligned with assorted non-objective shapes with no planar distinction between them. This commensuration of subjects, the representational and non-, is typical of his mid 40s work.
In Léger's still-life of the mid 1940s a 'Léger line' or a 'Léger form' become instantly recognizable. To a greater degree than before each part of his pictorial vocabulary, affirmative and individual as it is, becomes interchangeable within his work...The elements of landscape, still life and figures were amalgamated; Léger now sought their synthesis. One of the methods which he used to achieve this was an enormous strengthening of colour, often described by him as 'a formidable raw material, as indispensable to life as fire or water' (ibid., p. 134).
La racine grise is not only stylistically but historically emblematic as it was acquired directly from the personal collection of Paule and Adrien Maeght, descendants of Léger's primary dealer of the post-war era, Aimé Maeght. A publisher as well as a gallery owner, Maeght collaborated with Georges Bauquier on the multi-volume catalogue raisonné of Léger's work. This work was among the selection of works in the Maeght private collection that was not donated the Fondation Maeght which opened to the public in 1963.