Fernand Leger (1881-1955)

Fernand Léger, Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso were all born within a year of each other; each had their beginnings as modernists in Cubism, and they all painted prolifically to the end of lengthy careers. Léger holds the special distinction among them of having executed one of his greatest and largest canvases near the end of his life in 1954, the état définitif of La Grande Parade (The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York). Far from slowing down, Léger appears to have grown ever more eager to engage in diverse projects as he approached his seventieth year. He directed a large atelier capable of producing stained-glass windows (fig. 1), and monumental sculpture and mosaics.
Léger's post-war pictures usually display one of two formal approaches, and often he treated a subject twice, first in one and then in the other manner. One approach—as seen in the present work—was to define the figure or object using black contours which like a vessel contain local color that may have been derived from the actual object or arbitrarily selected for pictorial purposes. In the alternative approach, black contours were retained and even strengthened while local color was discarded. The imagery is consequently flatter, the design more graphic and reductive, having been rendered entirely as black outlines on a gray and black ground which has been partly covered with bands and patches of pure color.
The present spirited, colorful and pulsing Le Linge qui Sèche of 1947 carries forward, in Léger's more freely composed and organic post-war style, the precedents of the great compositions he had done during the 1920s. Compositional elements are bound together in this complex and large-scale canvas on a single, flattened but spatially ambiguous plane. Objects and the ground merge into a single, unified space. The irregular and twisting borders of the composition moreover appear to negate the rectangular format of the canvas. The artist thereafter employed this means of enmeshing object with ground to guide the composition of his relief sculptures in bronze and painted ceramic.
The straightforward use of blue, white and red—the French tricolor—also points to the allegorical dimension in this canvas, as a paean to his native land, even if the artist would argue that he was simply using objects, "not for its sentimental value," he declared, but solely for its plastic value. Léger wrote: "The plastic life, the picture, is made up of harmonious relationships among volumes, lines and colors. These are the three forces that must govern works of art. If, in organizing these three essential elements harmoniously, one finds that objects, elements of reality, can enter into the composition, it may be better and may give the work more richness. But they must be subordinated to the three essential elements mentioned above... Sometimes these relationships are merely decorative when they are abstract. But if objects figure in the composition—free objects with a genuine plastic value—pictures result that have as much variety and profundity as any with an imitative subject" (quoted in E.F. Fry, ed., Fernand Léger, Functions of Painting, New York, 1973, pp. 155, 168 and 169).
It is color that lends this work its sense of depth, despite the sparse conventional modeling. Bright primary colors separated by thick black outlines, create the semblance of space within the picture plane. Five years before painting the present work Léger asserted that, "Color can enter into play with a surprising and active force without any need to incorporate instructive or sentimental elements. A wall can be destroyed by the application of pure colors... A wall can be made to advance or recede, to become visually mobile. All this with color" (quoted in ibid., p. 123). Léger's late "mural" style represents the ultimate evolution of the basic principles of painting that he set forth in his celebrated Contrastes de formes series of 1913-1914, "the simultaneous ordering of three plastic components: Lines, Forms and Colors" (quoted in ibid., p. 4).
Since the 1930s Léger had been striving to create a popular art that would communicate clearly and effectively among large numbers of people he believed would be receptive to art, but had few opportunities to enjoy it. Even if Léger has cast this picture in the modern syntax of his late mural style, Le Linge qui Sèche is a universally communicative and engaging painting. Peter de Francia observed that, "Intensity of reality is achieved by the contrast of prosaic objects with pictorial artifice... Léger's paintings are exorcized of mystery. Formalized elements, used sparingly, invalidate any tendency to interpret figuration in terms of naturalism... Each element is completely predictable and readable" (ibid., p. 228).