Fernand Léger - Artists - Helly Nahmad Gallery

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Fernand Léger, Les femmes à la toilette, 1920 Oil on canvas 92.3 x 73.3 cm. (36 3/8 x 28 7/8 in.) Léger painted 'Les Femmes à la toilette' as the penultimate work in a rare and important sequence of eight canvases done in 1920, half of which are now in museum collections, on the theme of a woman seated at her boudoir table and looking into her mirror, as she attends to her daily toilette (Bauquier, nos. 217-224). This cycle exists in two sets. The artist titled the first series 'La Femme au mirroir', (B., nos. 217-221). As his conception of the theme grew more elaborate he described his female subjects as "à la toilette" (B., nos. 222-224). In each of these three latter paintings two women share the dressing table, although in the final canvas, the largest of the set, the artist unaccountably reverts in his title to 'femme' (singular), even while the picture appears to reiterate most of the elements seen in the present canvas and the smaller version preceding it.

Fernand Léger, Les Femmes à la Toilette, 1920
Oil on canvas
92.3 x 73.3 cm. (36 3/8 x 28 7/8 in.)
©Helly Nahmad Gallery NY

Fernand Léger, Nature Morte, 1927 Oil on canvas 130.2 x 88.9 cm. (51 1/4 x 35 in.) A vertical divide bisects the canvas of Nature morte into two unequally sized sections. The presence of two objects dominates the composition: a squat red pot of flowers on the right hand side, offset on the left by the visible portion of a tall black vase. There is a related version of this composition, painted in 1926, in which the objects and their respective environments appear in reverse (Bauquier, no. 447). The flowers are ostensibly the only organic element in the present composition, yet they appear artificial; like everything else in the painting, their material substance has been reduced and purified, as if tooled and polished by means of a high-tech industrial process. Léger has reinforced the chosen vertical format of this composition by employing numerous straight up-and-down elements, using the curved lines and contours in the flowers, pot and vase to counteract and mitigate the overall geometric rigidity of the composition. By suggesting the presence of a floor or table-top in the foreground, Léger has created an illusion of receding space, into which the graphically flat rectilinear forms that comprise the setting fall into place, establishing the spatial schematic of an interior, with a mirror over a mantelpiece on the right, and a window at left. Contrasting objects both large and small, Léger has affixed his images of two French postage stamps to the axial column near the center of the composition. The painter has emphasized the hardness of his forms by rendering them in an austere palette based on the stark opposition of red and black, mediated in places by pale yellow, supplemented with two diagonally opposed patches of an earthy mauve tone. There are tensions of all kinds within this canvas--nonetheless, the architectural grandeur of Léger's overall conception steadies the composition and expresses a transcendent vision of stasis and serenity.

Fernand Léger, Nature Morte, 1927
Oil on canvas
130.2 x 88.9 cm. (51 1/4 x 35 in.)
©Helly Nahmad Gallery NY

Fernand Léger, Composition aux Trois Profils, 1937 Oil on canvas 89 x 130 cm. (35 x 51 1/4 in.) The contrasting of biomorphic and anthropomorphic shapes was a major concern for Léger and is a theme which appears in a number of his most important projects of the 1930's. Léger writes: “The human body is of no weightier plastic interest than a tree, a plant, a piece of rock, or a pile of rope. It is enough to compose a picture with these objects, being careful to choose those that may best create a composition… There is neither an abstract picture nor a concrete one. There is a beautiful picture and a bad picture. There is the picture that moves you and the one that leaves you indifferent… If I isolate a tree in a landscape, if I approach that tree, I see that its bark has an interesting design and a plastic form; that its branches have dynamic violence which ought to be observed; that its leaves are decorative. Locked up in ‘subject matter,' these elements are not ‘set in value.' It is here that the ‘new realism' finds itself” (F. Léger, The New Realism Goes On, 1936, quoted in C. Lanchner, Fernand Léger (exhibition catalogue), Museum of Modern Art, New York. 1998, p. 139). The contrast of the human and the bioplasmic first appears in Léger's work in Femme et fleur of 1926, but it does not become a predominant theme until the 1930s. The present work belongs to Léger's most abstract series founded on this contrast, and it anticipates the artist's development over the next decade. His fascination with the composition intensified in 1937, a highly productive year in which he made seven variations of the painting. The present painting – and the other versions from that year – have an unprecedented complexity of form, exuberance of movement and brilliance of color.

Fernand Léger, Composition aux Trois Profils, 1937
Oil on canvas
89 x 130 cm. (35 x 51 1/4 in.)
©Helly Nahmad Gallery NY