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Email to FriendSigned Fernand Leger, Lithograph, La Lecture (The Reader), c. 1953  |
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| Artist: | Leger, Fernand (1881 - 1955) |
|---|---|
| Title: | La Lecture (The Reader), c. 1953 |
| Medium: | Original Lithograph in Colours |
| Image Size: | 21 7/8 in x 17 in (55.6 cm x 43.2 cm) |
| Sheet Size: | 25 5/8 in x 21 1/16 in (65.1 cm x 53.5 cm) |
| Framed Size: | 41 7/8 in x 37 1/2 in (106.4 cm x 95.3 cm) |
| Signed: | Hand-signed by Fernand Léger (1881 - 1955) in pencil in the lower right margin; signed in the stone 'F. Leger' in black in the lower right. |
| Edition: | Numbered from the total edition of 350. |
| Condition: | This work is in excellent condition with bright, fresh colors |
| Gallery Price: Item# 2805 | Sorry, this item is sold. Please visit the rest of our Leger fine art collection |
| Historical Description: | |
|---|---|
| Two geometric female figures gaze out at the viewer, books in hand. The figure
on the left lounges, grasping an open book, yet does not look down to read but
rather stares out towards the viewer. The more symmetrical, bald figure on the
right stands at a harsh vertical with her book to her chest. This "bald"
female subject was the source of much criticism for Léger, yet he refused
to place hair upon her head. Gilles Néret states, "The anecdote
of the "bald" woman in The Reader, the 1924 painting, is significant
because it comes at a turning point in Léger's artistic life. The period
during which he was preoccupied uniquely by the isolation of objects, the human
body included, and the focus on volumes and contrasts, was on the verge of becoming
a new period in which his characters would start to live, do things (read, for
instance), be reflective, and dream, rather than be round, soul-less forms stuck
to a rigid geometric background" (p. 183).
Created in c. 1953, this work is hand signed by Fernand Léger (1881 - 1955) in pencil in the lower right margin; signed in the stone 'F. Leger' in black in the lower right. This work is numbered from the total edition of 350 in pencil in the lower left margin. DOCUMENTED AND ILLUSTRATED IN: 1. De Francia, Peter. Fernand Léger. New Haven: Yale University Press,
1983. The original 1924 oil on canvas illustrated and discussed on pg.89.
Museum-grade conservation framed in a contemporary gold moulding with silk mats and optical grade Plexiglas. | |
| Style: | 20th Century French Modern Master, pochoir, ceramic and tapestries |
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Biography of Fernand Leger
Fernand Leger (1881 - 1955)
French painter and designer. From c.1909 he participated in the Cubist movement. He is generally considered one of its major masters but his curvilinear and tubular forms (he was for a time called a 'tubist') contrasted with the fragmented forms preferred by Picasso and Braque. The First World War, during which he was gassed whilst serving as a stretcher-bearer, had a profound effect on Leger. His contact with men of different social classes and different walks of life came as a revelation: 'I was abruptly thrust into a reality which was both blinding and new,' he said. Henceforward he made it his ambition to create an art which should be accessible to all ranks of modem society.
In 1920 he met Le Corbusier and Ozenfant and in the early 1920s he was associated with their Purist movement. His paintings were static, with the precise and polished facture of machinery, and he had a fondness for including representations of mechanical parts.During the late 1920s and 1930s he also painted single objects isolated in space and sometimes blown up to gigantic size, In the inter-war years he expanded his range beyond easel painting, with murals and designs for the theatre and cinema. He was also busy as a teacher, notably at his own school, the Academie de I'Art Contemporain, and he traveled widely, making three visits to the USA in the 1930s. The connections he had made there stood him in good stead when he lived in America. During the Second World War he lived in the USA, teaching at Yale University, and at Mills College, California. Acrobats and cyclists were favorite subjects in his paintings of this time. From his return to France in 1945 his painting reflected more prominentlyhis political interest in the working classes. But its static, monumental style remained, with flat, unmodulated colours, heavy black contours, and a continuing concern with the contrast between cylindrical and rectilinear forms. in his later career Leger worked much on large decorative commissions, notably the windows and tapestries for the church at Audincourt (1951). Many honours came to him late in life, and a museum dedicated to him opened at Biot in France in 1957. In the catalogue of the exhibition Leger and Purist Paris' (Tate Gallery, London, 1970), John Golding wrote of Leger: 'No other major twentieth-century artist was to react to, and to reflect, such a wide range of artistic currents and movements . . . And yet he was to remain supremely independent as an artistic personality. Never at any moment in his career could he be described as a follower ... But his originality lay basically in his ability to adapt the ideas and to a certain extent even the visual discoveries of others to his own ends.' He saw the poetic value that lies in the clear delineation of everyday objects, the in trinsic beauty of modem machinery and the things which are mass-produced by machinery, and he favoured proletarian subjects, depicting them with the same clarity and precision as the themes taken from machine culture.
