Nature morte

With its crisp delineation of form, and flat planes of color and pattern, Nature morte encapsulates the visual dynamism of Fernand Léger’s bracingly modern still-life compositions from his mature career. Painted in 1927, the work reveals his continued interest in Purism at this time, the aesthetic championed by Le Corbusier and Amédée Ozenfant, which emphasized purity and rationality, logic and refinement, in an effort to develop a permanent and enduring art focused on the modern material world. Attracted to their theories, in particular the ideal of order as central to all artistic creation, Léger became closely involved with the movement, contributing to its journal, L’Esprit Nouveau, and founding the Académie de l’art moderne with Ozenfant in 1924. While these ideas permeated all aspects of Léger’s oeuvre, they found particularly powerful expression in the artist’s still lifes of the mid-1920s, in which he explored space and scale, the organic and the mechanical, in intriguingly constructed compositions.

In these canvases, Léger achieved a consummate state of architectonic balance and poise, generating striking contrasts through the carefully calculated juxtaposition of everyday objects. His imagery was often culled from the era’s industrialized, urban life, their forms simplified, isolated and made monumental within the ambiguous space of the picture plane. In the present Nature morte, Léger configures a number of recognizable elements—a manufactured fish, a mechanical angle-finder and ruler, and a stone bust of a woman with a classical hairstyle—to create a rich, multipartite still-life scene. A similar collection of objects feature in two other paintings from this year (Bauquier, nos. 510 and 512), both of which feature the fish and angle-finder, though with their positions inverted. Here, the fish has an almost Art-Deco feel with the red-and-white checkered pattern of its scales, while the ruler in the middle serves to introduce the notion of precise measurement to the scene.

The draughtsman’s angle-finder floating in the center of the canvas is opened at an obtuse angle, so that its frame forms a chevron or arrow, directing the viewer’s gaze across the composition. The sharp, geometric outline and rhythmic patterning of the central group of measuring devices, filled with their ladder-like progression of regular lines, offer a sharp contrast with the more organic form of the bust to the right, the only object within the scene that has been delicately modelled, capturing the fall of light and shadow across its hair and face. In the placement of the “arrow” shape between this antique sculpture and the boldly modern fishing lure, Léger may be subtly alluding to the link between these two seemingly divergent objects, perhaps suggesting that the same principles governing the design of one, has been shaped or influenced by the other.

In many ways, the still-life paintings from this period of Léger’s career are a meditation on this convergence of tradition and modernity, blending the artistic languages of the past with new, twentieth-century technology. For example, the rapidly evolving medium of cinema was essential to Léger’s way of seeing the world and approaching his subjects at this time. The artist himself had worked on avant-garde films including George Antheil’s Le ballet mécanique, and for a period even considered abandoning painting in favor of the new creative medium. Cinema’s montages, juxtapositions, and novel vantage points were revelatory, particularly the close-up, which allowed the auteur to zoom in on and fragment the familiar world, isolating and drawing attention to certain details, altering our perception of the everyday objects that surround us in the process. “These new means have given us a new mentality,” Léger wrote in 1928. “Composite wholes are no longer enough for us—we want to feel and grasp the details of those wholes—and we realize that these details, these fragments, if seen in isolation, have a complete and particular life of their own. Close-ups in the cinema are the consecration of this new vision” (“Actualités,” in Variétés, no. 1, 1928 reprinted in J. Freeman, Fernand Léger: The Later Years, exh. cat., Whitechapel, London, 1987, pp. 22-23).

Nature morte was formerly in the renowned collection of Stanley N. Barbee. In 1923, Barbee, together with his brothers, purchased the Coca-Cola franchise for Los Angeles and the surrounding area. Serving as President of the company, Barbee oversaw the reconstruction of the head office and bottling plant in the mid-1930s, hiring the architect, Robert V. Derrah, to design a new building on Los Angeles’ Central Avenue. This iconic, Streamline Moderne style structure was a distinctly Léger-like vision, an Art Deco imitation of a cruise liner running along the street, its clean lines and sharply delineated forms a symbol of modernity, cleanliness, and progress.

Barbee was also a fierce advocate and champion of the arts. In 1951, he was one of the signatories of a letter of protest against the local government of Los Angeles when they had begun to interfere in exhibitions of contemporary art, claiming that they concealed Communist leanings and meanings. He amassed an extensive and diverse art collection over the course of his lifetime, that included works by Rembrandt, Edouard Manet, Edgar Degas, Georges Seurat, Paul Cezanne, Paul Gauguin, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Pablo Picasso and Richard Diebenkorn. Barbee was also an active supporter of contemporary artists and a dedicated philanthropist, donating numerous artworks to museum collections across the United States.