拍品专文
Lger's interest in marrying architectural clarity to images of modern life, strongly influenced by his exposure to Lonce Rosenberg's De Stijl exhibition at the Galerie L'Effort Moderne in November 1923, resulted in still-lifes such as the present work, in which complex, quasi-Cubist compositions are joined by a stolid presentation of objects and an uninflected application of paint. The almost mathematical precision and clarity of these paintings can be related to works by the co-founders of Purism, Ozenfant and Le Corbusier, who sought to "solve" the problems of Cubism by reintroducing the integrity of individual objects, a proposal wholly contrary to the earlier movement's dissolution of solid forms.
Les Pommes exemplifies the range of concerns that Lger embraced in 1925, employing a more lyrical use of light and modelling than in those works of the previous two years when he had been under the influence of the De Stijl movement. What Lger called "the new lyricism of the transformed object" can be felt in the present work,
a lyricism in which color, form and object play equal parts...I also found the fragments of objects useful; by isolating them one personalizes them. This process led me to consider the happening of objectivity as a new, very topical value... The way in which one looks at objects and their parts involves a totally new realism. (F. Lger, quoted in W. Schmalenbach, Fernand Lger, New York, 1976, p. 126)
Discussing a closely related still-life from 1925, Le Compotier (Bauquier, no. 414; Private collection), Schmalenbach writes:
By fragmenting his objects Lger stressed their importance, just as the cinema, far from distracting attention from the object by showing only part of it, on the contrary heightens its effect. Here the object value of the bowl of fruit, cut in half as if with a knife and treated as a collage, is more strongly stressed because it is not the familiar object to which one hardly gives a thought. A bowl passes unnoticed; half a bowl catches our eye. (Ibid., p. 126)
Les Pommes is related to four still-life paintings from 1925, one of which (the study for the present work, Nature morte 1er tat; Bauquier, no. 412) is in the Menil Collection, Houston; and one (Nature morte - Le compotier de poires; Bauquier, no. 410) hangs in the Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe. The present work has been in the same private collection since the mid-1930s, and has not been seen in public for over sixty years.
Les Pommes exemplifies the range of concerns that Lger embraced in 1925, employing a more lyrical use of light and modelling than in those works of the previous two years when he had been under the influence of the De Stijl movement. What Lger called "the new lyricism of the transformed object" can be felt in the present work,
a lyricism in which color, form and object play equal parts...I also found the fragments of objects useful; by isolating them one personalizes them. This process led me to consider the happening of objectivity as a new, very topical value... The way in which one looks at objects and their parts involves a totally new realism. (F. Lger, quoted in W. Schmalenbach, Fernand Lger, New York, 1976, p. 126)
Discussing a closely related still-life from 1925, Le Compotier (Bauquier, no. 414; Private collection), Schmalenbach writes:
By fragmenting his objects Lger stressed their importance, just as the cinema, far from distracting attention from the object by showing only part of it, on the contrary heightens its effect. Here the object value of the bowl of fruit, cut in half as if with a knife and treated as a collage, is more strongly stressed because it is not the familiar object to which one hardly gives a thought. A bowl passes unnoticed; half a bowl catches our eye. (Ibid., p. 126)
Les Pommes is related to four still-life paintings from 1925, one of which (the study for the present work, Nature morte 1er tat; Bauquier, no. 412) is in the Menil Collection, Houston; and one (Nature morte - Le compotier de poires; Bauquier, no. 410) hangs in the Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe. The present work has been in the same private collection since the mid-1930s, and has not been seen in public for over sixty years.