1184. FERNAND LÉGER. Composition (Le médaillon).

Oil on canvas, 46 x 33 cm, including frame 55.5 x 42.5 cm. Signed and dated F. Leger 29 lower right. Inscribed, countersigned and dated on the reverse: "Composition I' ETAT F. LEGER 29".

Executed in 1929.

With notes on the stretcher: "6603", "11533", "N° 4892".

PROVENANCE
Galerie Simon, Paris, inv. no. 11533/6603.
Galerie Louise Leiris, Paris, inv. no. 11533/6603.
Buchholz Gallery, New York, inv. no. 9105.
Nierendorf Gallery, New York, inv. no. L 558.
Svensk-Franska konstgalleriet, Stockholm.
The collection of Editor Gerard Bonnier (1917-1987), Stockholm.
Swedish private collection, presented as a gift from the above.

EXHIBITED
Liljevalchs Konsthall, Stockholm, "Från Cézanne till Picasso", September 1954, cat. no. 198.
Moderna Museet, Stockholm, "Fernand Léger 1881-1955", 23 October- 29 November 1964, cat. no. 33.
Moderna Museet, Stockholm, "Ur Gerard Bonniers samling", 6 June-18 August 1968, cat. no. 38.

LITERATURE
Georges Bauquier, Fernand Léger: Catalogue raisonné, vol. 4, 1929-1931, 1995, no. 633, illustrated p. 56.
Niclas Östlind, Bokförläggaren och konsten, 2017, illustrated p. 19.

Fernand Léger came from humble beginnings, raised in Normandy the son of a cattle farmer, and gained his artistic training traditionally as an architectural draughtsman and studying during the early 1900s in Paris under Jean-Léon Gérôme and other academicians. He focused his attention on painting at around the age of twenty-five, creating works in the impressionist style ("Le Jardin de ma mère", oil on canvas, 1905, is one of the few works from this period that he did not later destroy). In 1907, after he saw the Paul Cézanne retrospective at the Salon d'Automne, his style shifted dramatically, and geometric forms assumed a greater emphasis in Léger's work. Moving to the Parisian artistic hub of Montparnasse in 1909, he became friends with modernist artists such as Alexander Archipenko, Jacques Lipchitz, Marc Chagall, and Robert Delaunay, and exhibited in 1910 at the Salon d'Automne - a groundbreaking exhibition year which would introduce cubism to a wider artistic audience - in the same room as Jean Metzinger and Henri Le Fauconnier. Léger's major painting from this period, "Nus dans la forêt", 1910, displays an individual form of cubism that critics termed "Tubism" for its emphasis on cylindrical forms.

Throughout the early 1910s, Léger's work became increasingly abstract, with various overlapping and connected geometric forms rendered in primary colors. His service in the French army, from 1914-16, during World War I, had a significant impact on his art. Witnessing the horrors of the war, he served at the front at Argonne and was nearly killed after a mustard gas attack by German troops at Verdun, and repeatedly sketching artillery pieces, airplanes, and fellow soldiers while in the trenches, all heralded Léger's "mechanical period" for which he is chiefly remembered and that in various iterations he explored throughout the remainder of his career. Recalling his wartime experiences, Léger explained, "I was stunned by the sight of the breech of a 75 millimeter in the sunlight. It was the magic of light on the white metal. That's all it took for me to forget the abstract art of 1912–1913. The crudeness, variety, humor, and downright perfection of certain men around me, their precise sense of utilitarian reality and its application in the midst of the life-and-death drama we were in... made me want to paint in slang with all its color and mobility." Important "mechanical" paintings from this transitional period, with their rigid, robot-like forms, include "Le Soldat à la Pipe", 1916, and "La Partie des cartes", 1917.

The "mechanical" works Léger painted during the subsequent 1920s decade display more orderly and harmonious compositions, with strong contours and smoothly-blended, brighter colors. Léger's preferred subject matter from this period, such as the mother and child, the female nude, figures in landscapes, and still life compositions, are also more traditional. The end of the decade, with the calamitous Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the onset of the Great Depression, cast into question the supremacy of mechanized industry, and ushered a watershed period in Léger's development, during which he markedly reevaluated his aesthetic. In 1929, he transformed significantly the mechanical vocabulary of his work during the previous decade, adopting less rigidly geometric compositions that showed objects liberated from spatial convention. At the turn of the decade, he was also appreciably influenced by Surrealism, notably the floating elements of Joan Miró's paintings and biomorphic forms evocative of Jean Arp’s sculptures. Around this time, organic and irregular forms began to intermingle with figural motifs regularly in Léger's work.

"Composition (Le médaillon)", is the first of three paintings that Léger made over a two year period, 1929-1931, consisting of the central motif of a gold medallion with a female profile, floating on a dark, velvet-like material, suspended from an arched red form. There is a distinct green architectural fragment along with a nautilus, circular stair, or fan-like object repeated in each of the three versions, and Léger used primary colors in the same pattern in the three compositions. The idealized female head, rendered in dark, bold contours, whether in profile - as on the medallion in the present work - or frontal, is a recurring image in Leger's work, particularly from this period onward. "Composition (Le médaillon)", Léger's initial treatment of the subject, is his "primo pensiero" of the recurring composition and as such has a more study-like quality; Léger also inscribed the canvas in oil on the reverse "Composition I' ETAT" which indicate a repetitive theme. Captivatingly, it is the smallest and most freely-rendered of the three versions of the composition that he completed, and was created at a significant turning point in Léger's illustrious artistic career.

Like many other European artists of the generation, Léger fled France during World War II for the United States. He had first visited New York and Chicago before the War in 1931, subsequently in 1935, The Museum of Modern Art, New York held an exhibition of his work, and in 1938 he was commissioned to decorate philanthropist and renowned art collector Nelson Rockefeller's New York apartment. During his wartime American sojourn of the early 1940s, Léger taught at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, and continued to evolve his artistic style. His paintings from this period are marked by freely drawn bands of bright colors juxtaposed with figures and objects outlined boldly in black. Léger credited the neon lights of New York as the source of this innovation. He remarked: "I was struck by the neon advertisements flashing all over Broadway. You are there, you talk to someone, and all of a sudden he turns blue. Then the color fades - another one comes and turns him red or yellow."

Following his return to France in 1945, Léger joined the Communist Party, and his art evolved to include scenes of popular life featuring acrobats, builders, divers, and country outings, all of which championed the heroic nature of the common man. He continued to paint prolifically through the remainder of his career, also expanding into various media including stained-glass and mosaics; in 1954 he began a project for a mosaic for the São Paulo Opera, Brazil, which he would not live to finish, he died suddenly at his home in 1955. In addition to the legacy of his tremendous artistic output, Léger is widely considered a progenitor of Pop Art, having been among the first artists to appropriate the objects of consumer society as the subjects of his paintings and popularize them through fine art.