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FERNAND LÉGER (1881-1955) L'Acrobate sur le cheval signed and dated

Currency:USD Category:Everything Else / Other Start Price:NA Estimated At:900,000.00 - 1,200,000.00 USD
FERNAND LÉGER (1881-1955) L'Acrobate sur le cheval signed and dated
FERNAND LÉGER
(1881-1955)
L'Acrobate sur le cheval
signed and dated
"53 F. Leger" (lower right);
signed again, inscribed and dated "L' Acrobate sur le cheval/
F. Leger.53" (on the reverse)
oil on canvas
25 5/8 x 19 3/4 in. (65 x 50 cm)
painted in 1953
Estimate: $900,000-1,200,000 <p>Provenance
Musée Léger, Biot
Galerie Louise Leiris, Paris
Private Collection, New York <p>Exhibited
Biot, Musée Fernand Léger, no. 405 <p>Literature
Dora Vallier, "La vie dans l'oeuvre de Léger," Cahiers d'Art, 1954, p. 147 (illustrated in color, as Femme Acrobate sur un cheval)
This work will be included in the forthcoming Léger catalogue raisonné (Volume 1951-1953, Maeght, Paris).
L'acrobate sur le cheval is one of a number of compositions depicting jugglers, acrobats, and circus performers on horses that anticipate the greatest monumental manifestation of Léger's final period, Le Grande Parade, which was painted one year after the present work and now hangs in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.
Painted in 1953, only two years before his death and one year after he had moved to Gif-sur-Yvette with his new wife, L'acrobate sur le cheval embodies Léger's aesthetic on painting through the use of uncompromisingly bold form and color. Emerging and evolving from his own period of Cubism in the 1920s, representing the world in terms of a mechanical order, Léger has retained the influence of this geometrical approach and, in addition, established his own very distinctive palette. Painting in primary and secondary colors, he articulates the contours with characteristic thick black lines. Thematically there is no hidden agenda, no reliance on archaic symbols or intellectual processes, just an unadulterated celebration of life and the world. In contrast to the rarefied aesthetic of Postwar abstraction, Léger's work of the 1940s and 1950s was intended to appeal to the public with a more comprehensible and recognizably figurative style. In the present painting, the horse and acrobat retain a monumental and stoic classicism, which pays tribute to Léger's study of early Gothic and Romanesque sculpture. Furthermore, they are imbued with a certain statuesque rigidity which is enhanced by the monochromatic background against which they are portrayed.
Léger's late paintings reflect this commitment to the Realism of the 1950s. As Léger himself said: "It is quite useless to make an attempt to force people to be aware of reality by simply showing them a replica of the reality surrounding them since ... they are aware of it already. And it is no use claiming that in doing so one is revealing something that they have either failed to notice or remained insensitive to. Painters are not conjurors. But what is important is to make them aware, through the unexpected things they discover in a painting, which may at first appear new and strange, of the newness of a reality they would like to know - something that could add enormously to their lives (quoted in Peter de Francia, FERNAND LEGER, New Haven, 1983, p. 210).
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