.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
In May 1913, Fernand Léger delivered a lecture at the Académie Wassilief in Paris, in which he discussed the ideas and concepts that were underpinning the highly experimental, visual inquiries he was then tackling in his painting. Among his thoughtful analysis of the series of events and developments that had led contemporary art to its current state, he boldly proclaimed, “From now on, everything can converge toward an intense realism obtained by purely dynamic means. Pictorial contrasts used in their purest sense (complementary colors, lines, and forms) are henceforth the structural basis of modern pictures” (“The Origins of Painting and its Representational Value” in E.F. Fry, ed., Functions of Painting by Fernand Léger, London, 1973, p. 5). With this statement, Léger revealed the ground-breaking shifts that were occurring in his practice at this time, as he ventured beyond the formal and intellectual daring of Cubism to reach a new and unprecedented form of abstraction.
Painted in 1914, Composition (Nature morte) embodies the central tenets of Léger’s innovative style, and comes from the extraordinary corpus of works collectively known as the Contrastes de formes, which he produced in a wave of intense productivity between 1912-1914. Using the fundamental tools of composition—color, line and form, which he described as the “three indispensable components” of art—Léger created a new, reduced and purified artistic vocabulary through which he tested the very boundaries of representation. Through an assortment of cylindrical, tubular and cubic shapes demarcated with black lines and streaks of bold color, he constructed compositions based simply upon the contrasts and oppositions of forms. Considered among the most ground-breaking and radical artistic innovations from the pre-War years, these paintings stand as a landmark in the development of twentieth century modernism, and are a testament to Léger’s visionary spirit.
Léger was extremely conscious of the ways in which modern technological advances were ushering in dramatic changes in perception during the opening decades of the twentieth century, from the ways in which people travelled through and interacted with the world, to the increasing prominence of cinema and photography in their lives. “If pictorial expression has changed,” he explained, “it is because modern life has necessitated it. The existence of modern creative people is much more intense and more complex than that of people in earlier centuries. The thing that is imagined is less fixed, the object exposes itself less than it did formerly. When one crosses a landscape by automobile or express train, it becomes fragmented; it loses in descriptive value but gains in synthetic value. The view through the door of the railroad car or the automobile windshield, in combination with the speed, has altered the habitual look of things. A modern man registers a hundred more sensory impressions than an eighteenth-century artist. The compression of the modern picture, its variety, its breaking up of forms, are the result of this” (“Contemporary Achievements in Painting” in ibid., pp. 11-12).
It was these ideas and experiences that profoundly reshaped and redefined Léger’s approach to painting. While a number of the Contrastes de formes paintings appear as purely abstract compositions—their complex amalgamation of flat, overlapping geometric forms and vivid color contain no referents, yet they conjure a rich internal energy and dynamism—other paintings from the seminal series examine traditional genres and subjects through this new language, from landscapes and still lifes, to the female nude. Speaking in the same year as the present work was painted, Léger mused: “I purposely did not take a so-called modern subject because I do not know what is an ancient or a modern subject; all I know is what is a new interpretation. All that is method; the only interesting thing is how it is used” (ibid., pp. 16-17). By reinvestigating these traditional artistic subjects, Léger was testing the full potential of his bold new idiom, exploring its ability to evolve and develop in directions beyond pure form alone.
Composition (Nature morte) is one of a concentrated group of six still-life paintings that Léger created in 1914 (Bauquier, nos. 81-84, 89 and 90), in which this approach comes to full fruition. While several gouaches from this period also examine the subject of the still life, they adopt a more horizontal view, in which the different elements are scattered across the surface of a table. In contrast, the six color-filled paintings explore a vertiginous arrangement of forms, in which the table-top appears to tip upwards, towards the viewer, and the objects cluster together in a towering, gravity-defying configuration. The legibility of the objects varies from one canvas to the next—in some, the thick black outlines clearly indicate lamps, books, quotidian vessels, and even in one instance, an alarm clock. In others the individual objects dissolve and disappear among the mass of line and color, making it difficult to discern the individual elements.
In the present composition, the eye is initially drawn to the grouping of forms at the center of the canvas, stacked on top of one another and overlapping in a cluster of volumetric, curved and angular planes. In the lower left corner of the composition, a series of rectangles are aligned in such a manner as to suggest an open book, its slightly curved pages almost floating off the edge of the table, while to the right, an object appears to sit outside of the rest of the configuration, its shape suggesting it may be a paintbrush. This subtle addition implies the scene was inspired by a corner of the artist’s own studio, indicating Léger’s presence within the space, and drawing attention to his role in the creation of the work.
Using unmixed color, applied in vigorous lines directly onto the surface of the canvas, Léger emphasizes the painterly construction of the work and the sheer energy that lay behind his process. Art historian Christopher Green has delved into the artist’s technique, revealing the many steps that went into these compositions: “Léger first primes [the canvas] in grey, the primer having that roughcast quality, accentuated by rough handling... Then the linear movement and the shaping of the volumes are established in black, with long and decisive strokes of the loaded brush, their execution obviously accomplished at speed and almost all in a single session. Shape gives volume, but the grey surface remains dead without color and Léger himself described the next stage: ‘Only when I’d really got the volume, as I wanted it, did I begin to put in the colors. But that was hard. How many canvases were destroyed’... Red, yellow, blue and violet are literally scrubbed on with the brush, the colors taken straight from the tube, and then finally, when they are nearly dry, the highlights are added to give the paintings a completely solid, mechanical and dissonant presence... His technique is simple, without room for vacillation, and much of the force of these paintings is the result of its simplicity. It leads invariably to the clear separation of line from color patch so that, not only is the entire picture surface animated by the movement of volumes, but every surface contains its own arsenal of contrasts out of which it is built” (Léger and the Avant-Garde, New Haven, 1976, p. 90).
Composition (Nature morte) is filled with vibrant bursts of color, from bright scarlet and crimson, to deep, ultramarine and forest green. Touches of golden yellow enliven different elements within the composition, sitting alongside the passages of white paint, suggesting the warm glow of light off the surface of the objects. Each touch of pigment reveals the growing sophistication and nuance of Léger’s palette at this time, as he used subtle modulations of color to model his forms and lend them a sense of three-dimensionality within the scene.
In certain sections, Léger layers the different pigments atop one another, creating purple-hued highlights from the mixture of the red and blue for example, while a patch of green is enlivened through the addition of crimson, lending these passages a greater sense of depth and optical dynamism. Across the canvas, Léger deliberately doesn’t fill the contours of each form entirely, leaving small margins of exposed ground along the edges of each plane, allowing his colors to push forward from the picture plane and for the highly textured ground to become an active component within the composition. This impetuous, raw and unmediated mode of painterly creation was highly innovative, foregrounding the act of painting itself within the work of art, making it as much the focus of Léger’s composition as the titular still-life subject.
In October 1913, Léger signed an exclusive contract with the cubist dealer, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, joining a stable that included the leading cubist protagonists, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and Juan Gris. These artists were overthrowing the old order of picture-making, shattering the strictures of perspective, yet they still owed a debt to their artistic predecessors, namely the art of Paul Cezanne. Cezanne’s advice to his friend and fellow painter Emile Bernard in 1904 to “treat nature by means of the cylinder, the sphere, the cone, everything brought into proper perspective,” may be read as a singular point of origin for all that this young generation of artists unleashed. Kahnweiler, meanwhile, was more than simply a dealer—he played a vital role in the shaping, dissemination and critical reception of Cubism. In his writings about Léger, Kahnweiler described the force and dynamism that lay behind canvases such as Composition (Nature morte): “He wants to produce an effect. He strives for the weightiest three dimensionality of form and for stridency of color. He is animated by a desire to endow his painting with power, to make it dominate and sweep everything before it. Léger’s work shows a wealth of unspent, boundlessly seething strength” (quoted in E. Braun and R. Rabinow, Cubism: The Leonard A. Lauder Collection, exh. cat., The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2014, p. 167).
Composition (Nature morte) was formerly in the collection of the distinguished British art historian, patron, collector and champion of Cubism, Douglas Cooper, who purchased the work from Léonce Rosenberg’s Galerie de l’Effort Moderne in Paris in the mid-1930s. Cooper stands as one of the greatest collectors of the twentieth century—by the outbreak of the Second World War, after a period of just under a decade, his collection of Cubism was unparalleled. His deep knowledge of the four “essential” cubists, Braque, Gris, Léger, and Picasso (the latter two with whom he was also friends), as well as his acquaintance with many of the leading proponents of this movement—Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Alfred Flechtheim, Dr. Gottlieb Reber, and the Rosenbergs—enabled him to carefully acquire exceptional masterworks by these artists.
Cooper had first encountered Léger’s painting in 1930 at the Galerie Paul Rosenberg, and three years later visited the artist’s retrospective at the Kunsthaus Zurich. Struck by the power and dynamism of the artist’s oeuvre, Cooper took it upon himself to visit Léger at his studio on rue Notre Dame-des-Champs the next time he was in Paris. This meeting marked the beginning of a close friendship that lasted for over for twenty years. Cooper became an important champion of Léger’s work through the 1930s and 1940s, drawing critical attention to his ground-breaking early paintings, including the Contrastes de formes, elevating them to the status of icons of Cubism. “I salute Fernand Léger…” Cooper wrote in 1949, “the creator of new rhythms, and the painter-poet of contemporary reality… I love this art and I love the man, because he is authentic. I love his strong, violent and cheerful colors… I love his energy and his joy of living, his bubbling harshness. I love his robust conception of painting and I love the impetus in his execution” (quoted in D.M. Kosinski, Douglas Cooper and the Masters of Cubism, exh. cat., Tate, London, 1988, pp. 101-102).
Cooper dedicated an entire room of his home, the Château de Castille in Argilliers, to his legendary collection of Légers. In one photograph recording a lavish, candle-lit dinner taken around 1955, Cooper presides over a table filled with notable guests, including Picasso, Jean Cocteau, Michel and Zette Leiris, and John Richardson, while an extraordinary array of Léger’s compositions surround them. Composition (Nature morte) is visible just behind Cooper, on the left-hand side of the wall, its bold array of forms drawing the eye through the candles. The painting was purchased by the Saltzmans from Cooper’s collection sale in 1980, and has remained a key centerpiece of their collection ever since.
Painted in 1914, Composition (Nature morte) embodies the central tenets of Léger’s innovative style, and comes from the extraordinary corpus of works collectively known as the Contrastes de formes, which he produced in a wave of intense productivity between 1912-1914. Using the fundamental tools of composition—color, line and form, which he described as the “three indispensable components” of art—Léger created a new, reduced and purified artistic vocabulary through which he tested the very boundaries of representation. Through an assortment of cylindrical, tubular and cubic shapes demarcated with black lines and streaks of bold color, he constructed compositions based simply upon the contrasts and oppositions of forms. Considered among the most ground-breaking and radical artistic innovations from the pre-War years, these paintings stand as a landmark in the development of twentieth century modernism, and are a testament to Léger’s visionary spirit.
Léger was extremely conscious of the ways in which modern technological advances were ushering in dramatic changes in perception during the opening decades of the twentieth century, from the ways in which people travelled through and interacted with the world, to the increasing prominence of cinema and photography in their lives. “If pictorial expression has changed,” he explained, “it is because modern life has necessitated it. The existence of modern creative people is much more intense and more complex than that of people in earlier centuries. The thing that is imagined is less fixed, the object exposes itself less than it did formerly. When one crosses a landscape by automobile or express train, it becomes fragmented; it loses in descriptive value but gains in synthetic value. The view through the door of the railroad car or the automobile windshield, in combination with the speed, has altered the habitual look of things. A modern man registers a hundred more sensory impressions than an eighteenth-century artist. The compression of the modern picture, its variety, its breaking up of forms, are the result of this” (“Contemporary Achievements in Painting” in ibid., pp. 11-12).
It was these ideas and experiences that profoundly reshaped and redefined Léger’s approach to painting. While a number of the Contrastes de formes paintings appear as purely abstract compositions—their complex amalgamation of flat, overlapping geometric forms and vivid color contain no referents, yet they conjure a rich internal energy and dynamism—other paintings from the seminal series examine traditional genres and subjects through this new language, from landscapes and still lifes, to the female nude. Speaking in the same year as the present work was painted, Léger mused: “I purposely did not take a so-called modern subject because I do not know what is an ancient or a modern subject; all I know is what is a new interpretation. All that is method; the only interesting thing is how it is used” (ibid., pp. 16-17). By reinvestigating these traditional artistic subjects, Léger was testing the full potential of his bold new idiom, exploring its ability to evolve and develop in directions beyond pure form alone.
Composition (Nature morte) is one of a concentrated group of six still-life paintings that Léger created in 1914 (Bauquier, nos. 81-84, 89 and 90), in which this approach comes to full fruition. While several gouaches from this period also examine the subject of the still life, they adopt a more horizontal view, in which the different elements are scattered across the surface of a table. In contrast, the six color-filled paintings explore a vertiginous arrangement of forms, in which the table-top appears to tip upwards, towards the viewer, and the objects cluster together in a towering, gravity-defying configuration. The legibility of the objects varies from one canvas to the next—in some, the thick black outlines clearly indicate lamps, books, quotidian vessels, and even in one instance, an alarm clock. In others the individual objects dissolve and disappear among the mass of line and color, making it difficult to discern the individual elements.
In the present composition, the eye is initially drawn to the grouping of forms at the center of the canvas, stacked on top of one another and overlapping in a cluster of volumetric, curved and angular planes. In the lower left corner of the composition, a series of rectangles are aligned in such a manner as to suggest an open book, its slightly curved pages almost floating off the edge of the table, while to the right, an object appears to sit outside of the rest of the configuration, its shape suggesting it may be a paintbrush. This subtle addition implies the scene was inspired by a corner of the artist’s own studio, indicating Léger’s presence within the space, and drawing attention to his role in the creation of the work.
Using unmixed color, applied in vigorous lines directly onto the surface of the canvas, Léger emphasizes the painterly construction of the work and the sheer energy that lay behind his process. Art historian Christopher Green has delved into the artist’s technique, revealing the many steps that went into these compositions: “Léger first primes [the canvas] in grey, the primer having that roughcast quality, accentuated by rough handling... Then the linear movement and the shaping of the volumes are established in black, with long and decisive strokes of the loaded brush, their execution obviously accomplished at speed and almost all in a single session. Shape gives volume, but the grey surface remains dead without color and Léger himself described the next stage: ‘Only when I’d really got the volume, as I wanted it, did I begin to put in the colors. But that was hard. How many canvases were destroyed’... Red, yellow, blue and violet are literally scrubbed on with the brush, the colors taken straight from the tube, and then finally, when they are nearly dry, the highlights are added to give the paintings a completely solid, mechanical and dissonant presence... His technique is simple, without room for vacillation, and much of the force of these paintings is the result of its simplicity. It leads invariably to the clear separation of line from color patch so that, not only is the entire picture surface animated by the movement of volumes, but every surface contains its own arsenal of contrasts out of which it is built” (Léger and the Avant-Garde, New Haven, 1976, p. 90).
Composition (Nature morte) is filled with vibrant bursts of color, from bright scarlet and crimson, to deep, ultramarine and forest green. Touches of golden yellow enliven different elements within the composition, sitting alongside the passages of white paint, suggesting the warm glow of light off the surface of the objects. Each touch of pigment reveals the growing sophistication and nuance of Léger’s palette at this time, as he used subtle modulations of color to model his forms and lend them a sense of three-dimensionality within the scene.
In certain sections, Léger layers the different pigments atop one another, creating purple-hued highlights from the mixture of the red and blue for example, while a patch of green is enlivened through the addition of crimson, lending these passages a greater sense of depth and optical dynamism. Across the canvas, Léger deliberately doesn’t fill the contours of each form entirely, leaving small margins of exposed ground along the edges of each plane, allowing his colors to push forward from the picture plane and for the highly textured ground to become an active component within the composition. This impetuous, raw and unmediated mode of painterly creation was highly innovative, foregrounding the act of painting itself within the work of art, making it as much the focus of Léger’s composition as the titular still-life subject.
In October 1913, Léger signed an exclusive contract with the cubist dealer, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, joining a stable that included the leading cubist protagonists, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and Juan Gris. These artists were overthrowing the old order of picture-making, shattering the strictures of perspective, yet they still owed a debt to their artistic predecessors, namely the art of Paul Cezanne. Cezanne’s advice to his friend and fellow painter Emile Bernard in 1904 to “treat nature by means of the cylinder, the sphere, the cone, everything brought into proper perspective,” may be read as a singular point of origin for all that this young generation of artists unleashed. Kahnweiler, meanwhile, was more than simply a dealer—he played a vital role in the shaping, dissemination and critical reception of Cubism. In his writings about Léger, Kahnweiler described the force and dynamism that lay behind canvases such as Composition (Nature morte): “He wants to produce an effect. He strives for the weightiest three dimensionality of form and for stridency of color. He is animated by a desire to endow his painting with power, to make it dominate and sweep everything before it. Léger’s work shows a wealth of unspent, boundlessly seething strength” (quoted in E. Braun and R. Rabinow, Cubism: The Leonard A. Lauder Collection, exh. cat., The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2014, p. 167).
Composition (Nature morte) was formerly in the collection of the distinguished British art historian, patron, collector and champion of Cubism, Douglas Cooper, who purchased the work from Léonce Rosenberg’s Galerie de l’Effort Moderne in Paris in the mid-1930s. Cooper stands as one of the greatest collectors of the twentieth century—by the outbreak of the Second World War, after a period of just under a decade, his collection of Cubism was unparalleled. His deep knowledge of the four “essential” cubists, Braque, Gris, Léger, and Picasso (the latter two with whom he was also friends), as well as his acquaintance with many of the leading proponents of this movement—Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Alfred Flechtheim, Dr. Gottlieb Reber, and the Rosenbergs—enabled him to carefully acquire exceptional masterworks by these artists.
Cooper had first encountered Léger’s painting in 1930 at the Galerie Paul Rosenberg, and three years later visited the artist’s retrospective at the Kunsthaus Zurich. Struck by the power and dynamism of the artist’s oeuvre, Cooper took it upon himself to visit Léger at his studio on rue Notre Dame-des-Champs the next time he was in Paris. This meeting marked the beginning of a close friendship that lasted for over for twenty years. Cooper became an important champion of Léger’s work through the 1930s and 1940s, drawing critical attention to his ground-breaking early paintings, including the Contrastes de formes, elevating them to the status of icons of Cubism. “I salute Fernand Léger…” Cooper wrote in 1949, “the creator of new rhythms, and the painter-poet of contemporary reality… I love this art and I love the man, because he is authentic. I love his strong, violent and cheerful colors… I love his energy and his joy of living, his bubbling harshness. I love his robust conception of painting and I love the impetus in his execution” (quoted in D.M. Kosinski, Douglas Cooper and the Masters of Cubism, exh. cat., Tate, London, 1988, pp. 101-102).
Cooper dedicated an entire room of his home, the Château de Castille in Argilliers, to his legendary collection of Légers. In one photograph recording a lavish, candle-lit dinner taken around 1955, Cooper presides over a table filled with notable guests, including Picasso, Jean Cocteau, Michel and Zette Leiris, and John Richardson, while an extraordinary array of Léger’s compositions surround them. Composition (Nature morte) is visible just behind Cooper, on the left-hand side of the wall, its bold array of forms drawing the eye through the candles. The painting was purchased by the Saltzmans from Cooper’s collection sale in 1980, and has remained a key centerpiece of their collection ever since.