Le coquillage

Painted in 1929, Le coquillage is a large and imposing example from the major series of pictures Fernand Léger made in the late 1920s known as ‘Objects in Space.’ This important group of paintings profiled the startling formal qualities of a singular object – such as a leaf, a key or, as in this work, a shell – in such a way that the singularity and uniqueness of this otherwise ordinary object became visually emphasized as the integrated centrepiece of a dramatically rhythmic play of abstract and semi-abstract pictorial form. Founded upon the undeniable ‘reality’ of its central ‘object,’ these works pioneered what Léger proposed to be a ‘new realism.’ This was a realism that – in direct contrast to the Constructivists, the Abstractionists and the Surrealists who were at this same time championing their own ‘other’ and alternate realities – sought to reassert the primacy and innate mystery of the quotidian object, taken from the world of daily experience.
Appearing for the first time at auction, Le coquillage has a remarkable provenance and was likely acquired directly from the artist by the highly influential collectors Christian and Yvonne Zervos. Zervos revolutionised art criticism with his Cahiers d'art, which he had founded in 1926 as a modern art review, and he swiftly expanded the venture into a publishing house before opening a gallery of the same name in 1934. The couple were integral to Paris' artistic circles for the rest of their lives, organising exhibitions and promoting relationships between artists and dealers. Léger was a good friend of the couple, and stayed with them at their Burgundy farm house during the German Occupation of France in the Second World War.
As Douglas Cooper has explained, in this series of monumental paintings Léger began in 1927, ‘he exchanged the monumental for the living. The architectural elements disappeared and were replaced by scattered objects setting up a rhythm between themselves, while the space in which they moved was created by pushing the objects into the foreground and setting up a play of colours in the background. The objects are related to each other by means of carefully controlled chromatic values, by similar or opposing rhythms and by the use of lines of direction which weave in and out through the whole composition. Léger places his objects at just the right distance from each other: they are held there by virtue of the laws of harmony and rhythm’ (Fernand Léger et le nouvel espace, London, 1949, pp. xiv-xv).
Drawing on the way in which, for example, an advertisement for a pair of stockings often heroized its subject matter by isolating a single pair against a monochrome coloured background, or the surprising visual impact attained by a cinematic close-up, or an image seen under the close inspection of a microscope, Léger began in the late-1920s to similarly celebrate objects in his paintings by isolating them against abstract backgrounds. ‘I made [these] objects in space to be sure of my objects,’ Léger wrote. ‘I felt that I could not place an object on a table without lessening its value as an object... [Instead] I took the object and eliminated the table. I put this object in the air, without perspective and with no supports. Then I had to liberate colour to a greater extent’ (quoted in G. Néret, Fernand Léger, London, 1993, p. 142).
The solitary organic form of the leaf or a shell swiftly became the favoured ‘objects’ of these new paintings. Leaves and shells appeared time and again as the central motifs around which the artist sought to develop a new pictorial language that applied what he called ‘the law of plastic contrasts,’ grouping ‘contrary values together’ in the search ‘for a relationship of intensity never before achieved’(quoted in E.F. Fry, ed., Fernand Léger: The Functions of Painting, New York, 1973, pp. 29-30). In Le coquillage, the undulating rhythms of its central shell-form are set against a vibrant, monochrome yellow background, and then echoed visually by a rich variety of disparate, but wholly unrelated, painterly forms. Together, these signs, designs, symbols, letters and dotted lines dance and mimic the shell’s form and ultimately combine together into a unified and self-assertive pictorial reality all of its own.
As Léger was to point out, the innate arbitrariness of this new, pictorial language asserted by pictures such as Le coquillage was one that was underpinned by and also reminiscent in some respects of the micro- and macrocosmic worlds that were also being discovered and unveiled during this period by recent discoveries in contemporary science. ‘Scientific research,’ Léger wrote, ‘enabled artists to isolate this new reality. Underwater plants, infinitely tiny animals, a drop of water with its microbes magnified a thousand times by the microscope, can become new pictorial possibilities or permit a development in decorative art. One then understands that everything is of equal interest, that the human face or the human body is of no weightier plastic interest than a tree, a plant, a piece of rock, or a pile of rope. It is enough to compose a picture with these objects, being careful to choose those that may best create a composition… An example: if I compose a picture and use as an object a piece of tree bark, a fragment of a butterfly’s wing, and also a purely imaginary form, it is likely that you will not recognize the tree bark or the butterfly wing, and you will ask “What does that represent?” Is it an abstract picture? No, it is a representational picture. What we call an abstract picture does not exist. There is neither an abstract picture nor a concrete one. There is a beautiful picture and a bad picture. There is the picture that moves you and the one that leaves you indifferent. A picture can never be judged in comparison to more or less natural elements. A picture has a value in itself, like a musical score, like a poem. Reality is infinite and richly varied. What is reality? Where does it begin? Or end? How much of it should exist in painting? Impossible to answer…’ (‘The New Realism,’ 1935; in ibid., p. 111).