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Dimensions: measurements 44 5/8 by 57 1/2 in. alternate measurements 113.5 by 146 cm
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Provenance: Estate of the artistEstate of Nadia LégerGalerie Adrien Maeght, Paris (acquired from the above)Galerie Gmurzynska, Cologne (acquired from the above in 1984)Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1989
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Notes: This work will be included in the forthcoming Volume IX of the Fernand Léger Catalogue raisonné: 1952-1955 being published by Adrien Maeght Editeur with the collaboration of Irus Hansma, Claude Lefebvre du Prey and Nelly Maillard.
This large canvas is one of the final pictures that Léger was to complete before his death in 1955. It belongs to a series of oils and gouaches in which the artist interprets the subject of bathers as a cluster of limbs, torsos and heads. Figuration dominated Léger's late career (see fig. 1), and in the 1950s the artist occassionally rendered his highly stylized men and women in the context of a narrative, as evidenced by La Partie de campagne. But in this composition Léger has all but abandoned any theme. What he presents is a boldly abstract exploration of bodies and body parts as objects for the sake of formal exploration. Léger wrote about the need to decontextualize the body in modern painting in order to breath new life into this timeless subject: "As long as the human body is considered a sentimental or expressive value in painting, no evolution in picture of people will be possible. Its development has been hindered by the domination of the subject over the ages.... In contemporary modern painting, the object must become the leading character and dethrone the subject. Then, in turn, if the person, the face, and the human body become objects, the modern artist will be offered considerable freedom" (Fernand Léger, "The Human Body Considered as an Object", 1945, reprinted in Charles Harrison & Paul Wood, Art In Theory, 1900-1990, Cornwall, 1993, p. 640). In the present work, Léger, one of the pioneers of Cubism in the early 20th century, has come full circle in these last months of his life with this thoroughly modern deconstruction of form. Indeed, form is clearly the artist's primary concern, as he has limited his palette to shades of gray. The grisaille technique appeared recurrently in the artist's career, often to depict the central characters in his otherwise colorful compositions from the 1920s, such as Le Déjeuner (see fig. 2). This technique was an important aspect of his Purist phase that Léger was reluctant to abandon, and he would often reintroduce a gray-scale palette in his pictures of the 1940s and 1950s. Given the subject matter here, though, we are tempted to see yet another reason why Léger might have felt that grisaille was particularly appropriate for his bathers. Like his colleague Picasso during the 1950s, Léger was mindful of his grand predecessors in the history of French art. Aspects of the present picture call to mind Ingres' legendary Odalisque en gris (see fig. 3), perhaps one of the most important depictions of a nude of the neo-classical era. That Léger should seek to equate himself with his artistic predecessors was not unusual for an artist of his advanced age and importance in the development of modern art. But instead of looking back with nostalgia to the old masters, Léger takes their subject forward, reinterpreting it with his own radically modern aesthetic. Describing Léger's complex methodology, Charlotta Kotik has written, "[Léger] understood that there is no single solution to describe infintely changing reality. It necessitated a constant search for the mode of expression that would most accurate capture the original impetus, and elusive idea requiring different solutions at different times. He was capable of incorporating elements of two basic morpholigical systems, which had always been present in the arts - the classical and baroque orders. Through the interplay of seemingly incompatible tendencies, he arrived at the creation of new and fresh values which were to enliven his subsequent work" (Charlotta Kotik, "Léger in America," in Fernand Léger (exhibition catalogue), Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, 1982, p. 59).
