Fernand Léger (1881-1955)

Turning the domestic bric-a-brac surrounding a knife into an architectural assemblage of forms and colours, Nature morte au couteau exemplifies Fernand Léger’s ideal of art as providing aesthetic relief and pleasure to the lives of everyday citizens and workers. Developing a more socially engaged vision of art, in the 1930s Léger began to conceive of it as ‘the resting place after the strife of [people’s] daily struggles’ (quoted in ‘Color in the World’, pp. 119-131, in F. Léger, Functions of Painting, London, 1973, p. 130). ‘In this fast-moving and complex life that shoves us around, slices us up, we must have the strength to remain unhurried and calm, to work beyond the disintegrating elements that surround us, to conceive of life in its unhurried and peaceful sense…’, Léger wrote in 1938 (Ibid., p. 128). Executed in 1939, Nature morte au couteau puts into practise Léger’s own words, pronounced two years earlier: resorting to the still-life, a genre that invites contemplation and tranquillity, the picture transforms the prosaic detail of an abandoned knife into a dynamic world of bright colours and moving planes to be beheld and appreciated.

In 1939 – the year in which he executed Nature morte au couteau – Léger took a trip to the United States. There, he was offered the chance to develop his socially oriented art on a new scale, planning an animated film to be projected in the entrance hall of the Rockefeller Center in New York. On the occasion of the World’s Fair that year, Léger also conceived a mural for the Edison Building representing different sources of energies. Those projects allowed the artist to reach a large audience, fostering his belief in an art that could affect society. On a more domestic, intimate scale, Nature morte au couteau shares that same conviction, offering us an aesthetic alternative to the pacing world of chaotic modernity.