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45

FERNAND LÉGER

Currency:EUR Category:Everything Else / Other Start Price:NA Estimated At:28,000.00 - 32,000.00 EUR
FERNAND LÉGER
(Argentan 1881-1955 Gif-sur -Yvette) Fleur de Tournesol, 1953, gouache on paper, monogrammed, dated F. L.53, with dedication: À Claire Amicalement F. Léger, 40 x 33 cm, passepartout, (PM). Provenance: Annely Juda, London. Exhibition: London, Annely Juda Fine art, "From Picasso to Abstraction", 1989, no. 45 with ill. Léger later created a colour lithograph after this gouache (Saphire 132). Léger's "professional code of ethics" required truthfulness in regard to the employ of means of artistic expression and in regard to reality itself. He referred to a "new realism" which would only be able to encompass reality by going beyond simple representation, and academic naturalism. Neither imitative nor descriptive, Léger's concept of realism also draws a clear line between itself and "Socialist Realism", which is particularly evident in the ten years following WWII. Léger himself was a member of the Communist Party. He refused to compromise. His "new realism" could not be interpreted as a pale imitation of reality because - so his argument went - contemporary reality included an essential element of aesthetic reality, the autonomy of form and colour achieved by the Impressionists and Cézanne. Advertising posters, machines, and workers alone were not enough to make a picture realistic and modern: form and colour needed to be recognised as autonomous artistic facts. For Léger this was a precondition of realism. "The relationships between volumes, lines, and colours provide the foundation of recent artistic endeavours," though he concedes that, "An artist who seeks to achieve a balance between these three basic elements may of course use individual objects taken from reality if he feels they suit his composition. Their presence might enrich his work. As long as he makes sure that they remain subordinate to the three basic pictorial principles." (Fernand Léger, Kunsthalle der Hypo- Kulturstiftung München, 1989; from a text by Werner Schmalenbach).
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