L'Esprit Nouveau :: Still-Life and Objects in Space
L'Esprit Nouveau or a systematic distillation of Cubism

THE SILENT DIALOGUE BETWEEN THE CUBISTS AND THEIR AFRICAN INTERCESSORS

THE DIALOGUE SILENCIEUX ENTRE LES CUBISTES ET LEURS INTERCESSEURS AFRICAINS
grafted futurism on to
analytical cubism		 L'Esprit Nouveau or a systematic distillation of Cubism
THE PURIST PHASE: 1923-26
Still-Lifes' Category "I completed paintings whose important elements were objects set right outside any kind of atmosphere and unconnected with anything normal -objects isolated from the subjects I had abandoned"
Still-Life, 1923
Still-Life, 1924
The Spectacles, 1929
Still-Lifes' Category "Pencil is used not just for the sake of tension in the line but also to bring out the richness of the texture, and to show the clear, strongly defined relationships between black, white and grey areas wothout gradations.These areas combine with precision of contour to form an arrangement as rigid 'Composition with Umbrella and Hat,1925'. There is absolute harmony between the reality of the object and the purity of style, between what Leger called 'the Code of Realism'and 'the Code of Invention'."Jean Leymarie
Comp.[Definitive],1925
Study for Comp with Profile,1926 Composition avec Profil,1926 "the door handle and finger plateon the right - the muted range of color, its severely stablestructure - conjunction of door mechanism, of stencil signs in mirror reversal and especially of disembodied profile, eyeless and cold... a purely plastic fact " Jean Leymarie
OBJECTS IN SPACE:: 1928-32
Composition Gouache,1924Still-Lifes' Category The drawings have lost their architectonic structures: the orthogonal supports, particularly the table, have disappeared, so that the objects are now isolated in space, no longer have the natural interrelationships, which make even the most inventive still-life a familiar organism, i.e. a subject. Leger's objects have escaped from the domination of the subject, as they have from the pull of gravity; they invert or reject pesrpective, loom up and recede in the air, with the power and mystery of pictures in slow motion. This decisive change, the abrupt turning from a static, frontal, solemn order to a fluid and playful freedom, corresponds to the painter's internal dialectic: "I put my objects in space in order to besure of them as objects. I felt that I could not put my object on a table without diminishing its force as object!"
Leger and the Avant -Garde, Christopher Green - Yale Univ Press 1976 - ISBN 0-300-01800-2
Fernand Leger - Drawingsand Gouaches, Jean Cassou & Jean Leymarie - NY Graphic Society Ltd - ISBN 0-8212-0532-3
Fernand Leger, Albright-Knox Art Gallery - Abbeville Press NY ISBN 0-89659-256-1
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