Lot Essay
The two versions of La Grande Parade are the most important paintings of Lger's final years. The first state was painted in 1952 (coll. Galerie Louise Leiris, Paris). The second, definitive state was completed in 1954 (coll. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York). Both pictures draw upon subjects and formal ideas of the previous fifteen years, stemming most notably from the Plongeurs (Divers) series of the 1940s, whose tumbling, intertwined figures provided a model for the figure groupings in La Grande Parade.
Acrobats are the central characters of La Grande Parade, and they are a subject that the artist treated as far back as Les Acrobats de la cirque, 1918. Acrobats represented for Lger a symbol of man's freedom, and the circus theme was emblematic of human artistic endeavor, combining elements of theatre, music and dance.
Altogether, Lger made nearly seventy oil paintings related to this subject in the early 1950s, as well as numerous drawings and watercolors. The present work represents an interim stage between the two versions. It incorporates the clouds and landscape setting of the first version. It introduces the clown seen standing at the far right, and eliminates the reclining figure seen at lower right of the first version. In this study the semi-circular shape at the center of the first version is transformed more legibly into the letter "C" (for "Cirque"), as seen in the definitive state.
The present work was dedicated and presented to Sergei Youtkevich (1904-1985), a Soviet film director whose work was widely admired in leftist circles in France.
Acrobats are the central characters of La Grande Parade, and they are a subject that the artist treated as far back as Les Acrobats de la cirque, 1918. Acrobats represented for Lger a symbol of man's freedom, and the circus theme was emblematic of human artistic endeavor, combining elements of theatre, music and dance.
Altogether, Lger made nearly seventy oil paintings related to this subject in the early 1950s, as well as numerous drawings and watercolors. The present work represents an interim stage between the two versions. It incorporates the clouds and landscape setting of the first version. It introduces the clown seen standing at the far right, and eliminates the reclining figure seen at lower right of the first version. In this study the semi-circular shape at the center of the first version is transformed more legibly into the letter "C" (for "Cirque"), as seen in the definitive state.
The present work was dedicated and presented to Sergei Youtkevich (1904-1985), a Soviet film director whose work was widely admired in leftist circles in France.