Léger, Fernand (1881-1955)
Femme au vase (Woman with vase)
1924
Oil on canvas, 92 x 65 cm
Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen
A woman with a red vase in her arms is depicted strictly frontally and with a linear precision that gives the image a classic and monumental character. The face is empty, the body is stiff and broken into parts. The woman’s dress has the shape of a stable Doric column. The palette is simple and composed entirely of blue, red, white and black on a light grey background. The simplification of shapes and colors gives the image a universal character. The woman is a kind of ideal figure who is cleansed of specific traits and elevated above time and place. After the First World War, a neoclassical trend swept over the Paris scene. After the trauma of the war, many artists, including Picasso and Laurens, sought back to classical stylistic features as a visionary image of a new age of coherence, order, and social harmony. Source: Dorthe Aagesen.
A frontal portrait of a woman with a vase, where the hands holding the vase become part of the vase’s ornamentation. Both hands do not grasp or hold the vase, but, like the woman herself, are made in a tangible way like the vase herself. The woman’s lower body or skirt is like a cannellated pillar, arms, chest and hair composed of cylinders, balls and wavy surfaces. The colours are red and blue, shades of grey and black. Before World War I, Fernand Léger cultivated an abstract idiom. When meeting ordinary French men in the engineer troops during the war, he never again left the recognizable motifs, even though he built them up with inspiration from machines and simple geometric shapes. At the beginning of the 1920s, Léger was preoccupied with continuing his great classical compatriots such as David and Poussin in an expression that is static and architectural, but at the same time objectified and anonymous, where each part of the picture has equal meaning. Source: Karsten Ohrt, CATALOGUETEXT, 6.11.2019. (SMK)