Fernand Léger (1881-1955)

‘Léger is in pursuit of further discovery about the modern world. As a painter, he perceives himself to be powerfully positioned to participate in this great current – more pervasive every day – that is the phenomenon of contemporary architecture: countless new objects are being created under the sign of this new spirit, and the general production of our era is tearing us from the past and propelling us into an imminent new phase.’

Le Corbusier, ‘L’Architecture et Fernand Léger‘, in Léger: Modern Art and the Metropolis, Exh. cat., Philadelphia, 2014, p. 215).

Fernand Léger’s brilliantly coloured Composition avec coquille, painted in 1929, dates from a period during which Léger had begun to introduce natural, organic forms into his mechanically inspired, geometric compositions. As a result, his paintings of this time, of which Composition avec coquille is a prime example, became less rigidly structured, permeated with visual rhythms and pictorial contrasts that the juxtaposition of forms engendered.

Within a floating composition of seemingly abstract forms, two shells are depicted in front of a black and white structure that is reminiscent of architect, Le Corbusier’s seminal modernist building, the Villa Savoye, situated outside Paris. Constructed between 1928 and 1931, this iconic piece of architecture, with its bold structure of white, interlocking and unadorned geometric parts, was central to the development of architecture throughout the 20th Century; a visible embodiment of Le Corbusier’s Purist aesthetic. Léger had a keen awareness and appreciation of modern architecture and had met Le Corbusier in 1920. In 1929, the year that Composition avec coquille was painted, Léger and Le Corbusier both wrote statements in which they affirm an equivalence between modern architecture and modern painting. Le Corbusier saw an analogy between the combination and interplay of geometric forms in Léger’s modern painting and his own conception of architecture, and likewise, Léger envisioned artistic components, such as colour, as having an architectural function. In this way, Composition avec coquille could be seen as Léger’s visual tribute to the shared modernist visual aesthetics of the painter and architect.