Léger, Fernand (1881-1955)
Paysage d’hiver (Winter landscape)
1953
Oil on canvas, 64.8 x 91.4 cm
Private collection
In the early 1950s Léger began working on a series of paintings and works on paper on the theme of the Modern landscape which compared and contrasted nature with the rising grid-work of technology. In the present work, Léger compares the organic with the mechanistic landscape and clouds with the abstracted and geometric shapes and letters that is the modern city. Paysage d’hiver further plays with the juxtaposition of landscape and man made construction in the contrast of the stripped winter trees along the lower edge, whose pruned branches reach into the scaffolding set just behind. In Léger‘s own words, “Later people are going to see that this modern art of ours is not so revolutionary as it seems, that it is linked to those old traditions to which it was obliged to struggle in a lonely battle before breaking free…. It is quite useless to make an attempt to force people to be aware of reality by simply showing them a replica of the reality surrounding them since… they are aware of it already. And it is no use claiming that in doing so one is revealing something that they have either failed to notice or remained insensitive to. Painter’s aren’t conjurers. But what is important is to make them aware, through the unexpected things they discover in a painting, which may at first appear new and strange, of the newness of the reality they would like to know – something that could add enormously to their lives” (quoted in P. de Francia, Fernand Léger, New York & London, 1983, pp. 210 & 220). (Sotheby’s)