Lot Essay
As chairman of the advisory commission of architects for the New York World’s Fair of 1939, Harvey Wiley Corbett (1873-1954) commissioned Conrad to execute a concept of a fountain by the celebrated French artist and sculptor, Fernand Léger. The remarkable model that Conrad created, utilizing plastics and metals to translate Léger’s abstract, mechanistic construction, was designed to be fully-functioning, equipped with an extensive miniature plumbing system to replicate the performance of the fountain. This important and early model illustrates Conrad’s technical brilliance, and endures as a striking example of a concept for a large-scale sculptural work by Léger, that was unfortunately never realized at the World’s Fair.