Fernand LÉGER (1881-1955) - Lot 33

Fernand LÉGER (1881-1955) Flowers in a Blue Vase, circa 1949/1950 Oil and gouache on canvas, preparatory study, unsigned 41 x 33 cm Provenance: private collection, Paris This is the preparatory study for the oil on canvas of the same title, measuring 66 x 50.8 cm, reproduced and described under N°1384 on pages 112 and 113. In Georges Bauquier's "Fernand Léger, Catalogue Raisonné 1949-1951", Éditions Maeght, Paris, 2003. "Un nouveau réalisme, la couleur pure et l'objet" (excerpt) Lecture at New York's MoMA, during the first retrospective of his work in 1935, reproduced in Fonction de la peinture, revised and expanded edition, Gallimard, 2004, pp. 187-188. "The current evolution of art can be seen as a battle that has been going on for fifty years between the conception of the subject as conceived by the Italian Renaissance and the interest in the object and the pure tone that is increasingly asserting itself in our modern ideas. It's a battle worth following, studying and observing closely, because it's still very much with us today. It's a kind of revolution with far-reaching consequences. This sense of the object is already present in primitive paintings - in the works of the Egyptian, Assyrian, Greek, Roman and Gothic High Ages. Modern artists will develop it, isolate it and draw all possible consequences from it. The subject's obligation is no longer accepted. The framework that dominated all Renaissance art was broken. The subject destroyed, something else had to be found: the object and pure color became the replacement value. In this new phase, freedom of composition became infinite. Total freedom to create imaginative compositions in which the creative imagination can reveal itself and develop. The object that had been enclosed within the subject becomes free, and the pure color that had been unable to assert itself emerges. It becomes the main character of new pictorial works.