Fernand Léger

This work has been authenticated by the Comité Léger and will be sold with a Certificate of Authenticity.

Provenance:
James Vigeveno Galleries, Ojai, California.
Collection of Dr. & Mrs. J. Hirschmann.
Sotheby's New York, sale of May 7, 2003, lot 318.
Acquired directly from the above sale by the present owner.

Exhibition History:
"Naples Collects 2010," The von Liebig Art Center, Naples, Florida, January 23 - February 14, 2010.

Lot Essay:
In 1950, Fernand Léger declared the period that celebrated art for art’s sake and art without real objects was over. Instead, a new period was to begin, one in which artists returned to meaningful subjects that ordinary people could understand. He intended to appeal to the public with a more figurative style, one that rejected the elitist aesthetic of post-war abstraction. Léger maintained, however, that a return to the subject did not outright reject the use of abstract forms. It is precisely this fluctuation between the figurative and the abstract that lends the artist’s late work their energy.

The present still life, Fleur, 1950, exemplifies this energy, with its dynamic interplay of form, color, and composition. Here, Léger uses a bold, black contours to articulate the organic form of the flower, along with pure, bright color planes that enliven both the subject and the abstract composition behind it. As Léger describes, "I placed objects in space so that I could not place an object on a table without diminishing its value. I selected an object, chucked the table away. I put the object in space, minus the perspective. Minus anything to hold it there. I then had to liberate colour to an even greater extent" (quoted in Dora Vallier, "La Vie Fait l’Œuvre de Fernand Léger," in Cahiers d’Arts, no. 2, Paris, 1954, pp. 152-53). The vivid hues and confident lines create an impression of dynamism and vitality that goes beyond the two-dimensionality of the picture plane.

The daring and radical use of color and flat planes with which the artist composed his late works is evocative of the still lifes of his contemporary, Henri Matisse. It was also to influence a new generation of post-war American artists, including Roy Lichtenstein, David Hockney, and Barnet Newman, who pushed the limits of color and form, ultimately freeing them completely from the picture plane. A brilliant colorist and a master of expansive spatial effects, Léger pioneered a new pictorial language that was emphatically abstract and powerfully emotive.