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拍品专文
Held in the same private collection since 1970 and last seen in public over fifty years ago, Fernand Léger’s 1918 composition L’Armistice is a vibrant pictorial celebration of the end of the First World War. Filled with a multi-layered cascade of colourful flags, their rippling, fluttering forms draped from windows, buildings and balconies, the painting captures the exuberance and joy that engulfed Paris in the wake of the signing of the Armistice in November 1918, an event that officially brought the war to an end after four devastating years. The painting is also a powerful illustration of the ambition and energy of Léger’s style during this pivotal period, the play of colour and complex pattern of overlapping, geometric forms heralding the emergence of his distinctive peace-time approach to modernism.
Describing the war as ‘four years without colour,’ Léger had been deeply impacted by his experiences as a soldier on the front lines of the conflict. He had been a sapper in the Argonne, a wooded region in the northeast of the country, digging tunnels under no-man’s-land during some of the most violent and intensive fighting along the Western front in 1915. He subsequently took on the role of stretcher-bearer on the Aisne front and at the battle of Verdun the following year, before being invalided out of active service in early 1917. He spent several months convalescing, before slowly making his way back to Paris. Though it had been more than three years since he last picked up a paintbrush, Léger plunged himself into his work once again, experimenting, investigating, testing and syncretizing various pictorial ideas he observed around him, to find his own unique painterly language in the wake of the war.
During the dark days of life in the trenches, Paris had remained firmly lodged in the artist’s imagination as a place of hope, of life beyond the horrors of mechanised war. In a letter from April 1915 to his friend Louis Poughon, Léger revealed that he was already dreaming of a return: ‘How I will gobble Paris up, if I’m lucky enough to go back there! I will fill my pockets with it, and my eyes. I’ll walk about in it like I’ve never before walked about there…’ (quoted in C. Green, ‘Out of War: Léger’s Painting, 1914-1920,’ in D. Kosinski, ed., Fernand Léger: The Rhythm of Modern Life, 1911-1924, exh. cat., Kunstmuseum, Basel, 1994, p. 51). The fervent excitement of reimmersing himself in the architecture and atmosphere of Paris is suffused through Léger’s paintings of 1918, each canvas filled with the dynamism and simultaneity of life in the city. In L’Armistice, this is compounded by the overt jubilation of this historical moment, the streets bedecked in a collection of French tricolore and American flags that transform the cityscape with their vibrant hues, and reflect the captivating mixture of hope and excitement that swept through the city at the news.
While the artist had previously featured the iconic blue, white and red pattern of the French flag in his depictions of the nationalist celebrations surrounding Bastille Day in works such as Le 14 Juillet (1914, Bauquier, no. 93; Musée Nationale Fernand Léger, Biot) and Le 14 Juillet 1918 à Vernon (Bauquier, no. 105; Private collection), in the present painting Léger uses the bold bars of sheer colour to imbue his scene with a heightened degree of vibrancy and dynamism. Though repeated multiple times across the composition, each flag appears to have its own individual character—rendered in subtly variegated shades, they appear in varying sizes and arranged in different orientations, the breeze causing them to move and ripple gently in their own unique rhythm. The largest and most striking example hangs from the top edge of the canvas, rippling vertically into our field of vision, its centre stamped with a clear R. F., for République Française. The presence of the figure on a balcony on the opposite side of the street, meanwhile, emphasises the viewer’s own position within the scene. Glimpsed through the fluttering flags, this figure appears to lean over the railing, absorbing the optimism and buzzing energy of the celebrations on the streets below, a direct reflection of our own selves as we take in the scene.
The signing of the Armistice not only brought the Great War to a close, it also marked the beginning of an exciting new age. ‘1918: Peace. Man, exasperated, tensed, depersonalised for your years, finally raised his head, opened his eyes, looked around, relaxed, and rediscovered his taste for life,’ Léger wrote. ‘A frenzy of dancing, of spending... able at last to walk upright, to shout, to fight, to waste... Living forces, now unleashed, filled the world. The yellow canary and the red flower are still there, but one no longer sees them: through the open window, the wall across the street, violently coloured, comes into your house. Enormous letters, figures twelve feet high, are hurled into the apartment. Colour takes over. It is going to dominate everyday life. One will have to adjust to it’ (F. Léger, Functions of Painting, E.F. Fry, ed., London, 1973, p. 120).
In L’Armistice and other works of the period, the palette expanded and was taking its cue from the bright lights, the signs and the ads that had become part of the modern landscape. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Léger’s approach to form during this period was still firmly rooted in the bold, Cubist-inspired visual languages of the pre-war years, though now infused with a vibrancy and clarity. ‘I model uncompromisingly in pure local colour and in hefty volume,’ he stated in 1919. ‘I want to get rid of tasteful arrangements, delicate shading and dead surfaces. It is my ambition to achieve the maximum pictorial realisation by means of plastic contrasts. I couldn't care less for convention, taste and established style; if there is any of this in my painting it will be found out later; right now I'm going to make some life’ (quoted in C. Green, Léger and the Avant-Garde, New Haven & London, 1976, p. 136).
L’Armistice was purchased from the Sidney Janis Gallery by Nelson A. Rockefeller in the 1950s. When the painting was included in an exhibition of Rockefeller’s collection at The Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1969, curator William S. Lieberman wrote: ‘The small, brilliantly colored Armistice, with its almost enameled surface, parades a profusion of flags (one American) seen from a window. This is not a glorification of the modern metropolis; the little painting is intimate and, for Léger, unexpectedly lively’ (Twentieth-century art from the Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller Collection, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1969, p. 14).
Describing the war as ‘four years without colour,’ Léger had been deeply impacted by his experiences as a soldier on the front lines of the conflict. He had been a sapper in the Argonne, a wooded region in the northeast of the country, digging tunnels under no-man’s-land during some of the most violent and intensive fighting along the Western front in 1915. He subsequently took on the role of stretcher-bearer on the Aisne front and at the battle of Verdun the following year, before being invalided out of active service in early 1917. He spent several months convalescing, before slowly making his way back to Paris. Though it had been more than three years since he last picked up a paintbrush, Léger plunged himself into his work once again, experimenting, investigating, testing and syncretizing various pictorial ideas he observed around him, to find his own unique painterly language in the wake of the war.
During the dark days of life in the trenches, Paris had remained firmly lodged in the artist’s imagination as a place of hope, of life beyond the horrors of mechanised war. In a letter from April 1915 to his friend Louis Poughon, Léger revealed that he was already dreaming of a return: ‘How I will gobble Paris up, if I’m lucky enough to go back there! I will fill my pockets with it, and my eyes. I’ll walk about in it like I’ve never before walked about there…’ (quoted in C. Green, ‘Out of War: Léger’s Painting, 1914-1920,’ in D. Kosinski, ed., Fernand Léger: The Rhythm of Modern Life, 1911-1924, exh. cat., Kunstmuseum, Basel, 1994, p. 51). The fervent excitement of reimmersing himself in the architecture and atmosphere of Paris is suffused through Léger’s paintings of 1918, each canvas filled with the dynamism and simultaneity of life in the city. In L’Armistice, this is compounded by the overt jubilation of this historical moment, the streets bedecked in a collection of French tricolore and American flags that transform the cityscape with their vibrant hues, and reflect the captivating mixture of hope and excitement that swept through the city at the news.
While the artist had previously featured the iconic blue, white and red pattern of the French flag in his depictions of the nationalist celebrations surrounding Bastille Day in works such as Le 14 Juillet (1914, Bauquier, no. 93; Musée Nationale Fernand Léger, Biot) and Le 14 Juillet 1918 à Vernon (Bauquier, no. 105; Private collection), in the present painting Léger uses the bold bars of sheer colour to imbue his scene with a heightened degree of vibrancy and dynamism. Though repeated multiple times across the composition, each flag appears to have its own individual character—rendered in subtly variegated shades, they appear in varying sizes and arranged in different orientations, the breeze causing them to move and ripple gently in their own unique rhythm. The largest and most striking example hangs from the top edge of the canvas, rippling vertically into our field of vision, its centre stamped with a clear R. F., for République Française. The presence of the figure on a balcony on the opposite side of the street, meanwhile, emphasises the viewer’s own position within the scene. Glimpsed through the fluttering flags, this figure appears to lean over the railing, absorbing the optimism and buzzing energy of the celebrations on the streets below, a direct reflection of our own selves as we take in the scene.
The signing of the Armistice not only brought the Great War to a close, it also marked the beginning of an exciting new age. ‘1918: Peace. Man, exasperated, tensed, depersonalised for your years, finally raised his head, opened his eyes, looked around, relaxed, and rediscovered his taste for life,’ Léger wrote. ‘A frenzy of dancing, of spending... able at last to walk upright, to shout, to fight, to waste... Living forces, now unleashed, filled the world. The yellow canary and the red flower are still there, but one no longer sees them: through the open window, the wall across the street, violently coloured, comes into your house. Enormous letters, figures twelve feet high, are hurled into the apartment. Colour takes over. It is going to dominate everyday life. One will have to adjust to it’ (F. Léger, Functions of Painting, E.F. Fry, ed., London, 1973, p. 120).
In L’Armistice and other works of the period, the palette expanded and was taking its cue from the bright lights, the signs and the ads that had become part of the modern landscape. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Léger’s approach to form during this period was still firmly rooted in the bold, Cubist-inspired visual languages of the pre-war years, though now infused with a vibrancy and clarity. ‘I model uncompromisingly in pure local colour and in hefty volume,’ he stated in 1919. ‘I want to get rid of tasteful arrangements, delicate shading and dead surfaces. It is my ambition to achieve the maximum pictorial realisation by means of plastic contrasts. I couldn't care less for convention, taste and established style; if there is any of this in my painting it will be found out later; right now I'm going to make some life’ (quoted in C. Green, Léger and the Avant-Garde, New Haven & London, 1976, p. 136).
L’Armistice was purchased from the Sidney Janis Gallery by Nelson A. Rockefeller in the 1950s. When the painting was included in an exhibition of Rockefeller’s collection at The Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1969, curator William S. Lieberman wrote: ‘The small, brilliantly colored Armistice, with its almost enameled surface, parades a profusion of flags (one American) seen from a window. This is not a glorification of the modern metropolis; the little painting is intimate and, for Léger, unexpectedly lively’ (Twentieth-century art from the Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller Collection, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1969, p. 14).