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Email to FriendFernand Leger, Ceramic, Untitled (La Grande Margot), 1951  |
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| Artist: | Leger, Fernand (1881 - 1955) |
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| Title: | Untitled (La Grande Margot), 1951 |
| Reference: | Saphire 111 |
| Medium: | Original Hand Painted Ceramic Plaque |
| Image Size: | 18 in x 12 in x 2 in (45.7 cm x 30.5 cm x 5.08 cm) |
| Framed Size: | approx. 25 in x 20 in (63.5 cm x 50.8 cm) |
| Edition: | Annotated on verso: Edition Originale | D'Apres F. Leger no. 25 | Céramiste R. Bricel Biot A.M. |
| Condition: | This work is in very good condition with a glossy finish. |
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Item# 4020
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This lovely ceramic centers on the poised countenance of a woman rendered in Leger's characteristic, monumental style. His subject both hides and reveals herself with expressive hands. |
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| Historical Description: | |
Resembling other ceramic works created after the great master, this particular ceramic distinguishes itself by its bold orange accents. Translated from a lithograph, this image of a woman both hiding behind and revealing herself by her hands is striking. Leger's personal style becomes all the more powerful in this straightforward medium, where lines, modeling and cast shadows all play a role. The title of the working, translating to The Great Margot, reinforces the accessibility of this portrait. As an artist concerned with social movements, Leger championed the common person; his people all have similar features because they are all on the same, human plane. Therein lies the power of his simple, expressive art. Created after an original lithograph in colors entitled La Grande Margot, 1951, this original glazed ceramic plaque is annotated on the verso, "Edition Originale | D'Apres F. Leger no. 25 | Céramiste R. Bricel Biot A.M." Catalogue Raisonné & COA: 1. Saphire, Lawrence. Fernand Leger: The Complete Graphic Work. Fernand Mourlot, Preface. New York: Blue Moon Press, 1978. Listed and illustrated as catalogue raisonné no. 111 on pp. 176-77. 2. A Certificate of Authenticity will accompany this work. About the Framing: | |
| 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.
