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拍品專文
Léger executed Composition mécanique in the early 1920s, at the height of his "mechanical period". This abstract gouache, watercolor and ink composition was inspired by the rapid advances in technology in Western Europe during and after World War I. Léger, who served in the French military between 1914 and 1917, was drawn to the cold, complex beauty of these industrial designs and by the transformative implications for modern life. As Léger wrote to the famed avant-garde art dealer, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, in 1919, "The modern way of life is full of such elements for us; we must know how to use them...Every age brings with it some new elements which should serve us; the great difficulty is to translate them into plastic terms" (quoted in F. Fry, ed., Fernand Léger: Functions of Painting, New York, 1973, p. 45). Taking inspiration from machinery, Léger painted abstract, compound forms that individually recall tubes, pipes, buttons, bolts and beams. Collectively, however, these forms could evoke mechanized human figures, still-life objects, or an entire cityscape.
In Composition mécanique, a single, androgynous human figure appears in the midst of these abstract forms. The figure, like his or her surroundings, is made up entirely of angular and tubular elements. Léger began to incorporate more human figures into his compositions in the early 1920s, as he become more interested in how people navigated and related to their increasingly mechanized urban environments. Figures appear in his intimate works on paper and large-scale paintings, such as the Philadelphia Museum of Art's Paysage animé (1924; Bauquier no. 386). The present work is closely related to another gouache (J. Cassou and J. Leymarie, Fernand Léger, Dessins et gouches, Paris, 1972, no. 67) that belongs to the collection of The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.
Composition mécanique also demonstrates the influence of Purism on Léger's art. The French architect Charles-Édouard Jeanneret (Le Corbusier) and artist Amédée Ozenfant first articulated the aesthetic principles of Purism in Après le Cubisme (After Cubism, 1918), arguing that modern art should consist of simple geometry, mathematical order and chromatic simplicity. In Léger's work, these ideas found unique expression in dynamic overlapping and interlocking shapes in a reduced color palette of neutral black and white, as well as bold primary colors. As Alfred H. Barr, Jr., the founding director of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, observed in 1936, "This architectonic quality and the machine-line rigidity of [Léger's work] seems to have been influenced somewhat by the Purists...But Léger escaped the dryness and prettiness of most Purist paintings" (A.H. Barr Jr., Cubism and abstract art, New York, 1936, p. 96).
In Composition mécanique, a single, androgynous human figure appears in the midst of these abstract forms. The figure, like his or her surroundings, is made up entirely of angular and tubular elements. Léger began to incorporate more human figures into his compositions in the early 1920s, as he become more interested in how people navigated and related to their increasingly mechanized urban environments. Figures appear in his intimate works on paper and large-scale paintings, such as the Philadelphia Museum of Art's Paysage animé (1924; Bauquier no. 386). The present work is closely related to another gouache (J. Cassou and J. Leymarie, Fernand Léger, Dessins et gouches, Paris, 1972, no. 67) that belongs to the collection of The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.
Composition mécanique also demonstrates the influence of Purism on Léger's art. The French architect Charles-Édouard Jeanneret (Le Corbusier) and artist Amédée Ozenfant first articulated the aesthetic principles of Purism in Après le Cubisme (After Cubism, 1918), arguing that modern art should consist of simple geometry, mathematical order and chromatic simplicity. In Léger's work, these ideas found unique expression in dynamic overlapping and interlocking shapes in a reduced color palette of neutral black and white, as well as bold primary colors. As Alfred H. Barr, Jr., the founding director of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, observed in 1936, "This architectonic quality and the machine-line rigidity of [Léger's work] seems to have been influenced somewhat by the Purists...But Léger escaped the dryness and prettiness of most Purist paintings" (A.H. Barr Jr., Cubism and abstract art, New York, 1936, p. 96).