Georges Bauquier, Fernand Léger. Catalogue raisonné de l’œuvre peint 1932-1937, vol. V, Paris, 1996, no. 811, pp. 38, 292 (illustrated, p. 39)

One of the most illustrious figures in Modern art, Joseph Fernand Henri Léger (1881 – 1955) was a French multidisciplinary artist and painter. His bold, simplified forms, primary colours and modern subjects constituted a revolutionary and unique style, capturing and representing the external world in an accessible visual language. Internationally recognised from the 1930s onwards, Léger exhibited widely in both Europe and the United States, where he travelled on several occasions. Inspried by his first trip to the US in 1931, his creative output in the following years can be considered his most enigmatic, with his transition of thought and evolution of style becoming clearly as he began to transform the austerity of the architectural structure of compositions into level, un-modeled surfaces akin to the Surrealist experimentations, juxtaposing irrational space. Displacing objects from their conventional context, readjusting them to create new relationships, Léger questions our notion of reality within the still life. Expressing an idea based upon the foundation of real objects dispersed out of context, Léger asserted ‘I placed objects in space so that I could take them as a certainty. I felt that I could not place an object on a table without diminishing its value.’ (Dora Vallier, ‘La vie fait l’oeuvre de Fernand Léger. Propos receuillis’, Cahiers d’Art, Paris, XXIX, 1954, pp. 152-153.)

Born in a small town in Normandy, Léger moved to Paris in 1900 where he lived and worked for most of his life, spending a few years in the United States during World War II. He passed away in 1955. His work has been the subject of several major retrospective exhibitions, notably in 1998 at the MoMA, New York, USA and more recently in 2018 at the Tate Liverpool, UK. His work is part of important private and public collections around the world such as the MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Guggenheim Museum in New York, USA; the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, USA; the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington D.C., USA; the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, France; the Centre Pompidou in Paris, France; the Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland; the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo, Japan and the Tate Gallery, London, UK just to name a few.