Sergio Camargo, Brazil (acquired from the artist)
Joe Kantor, São Paulo
Waddington Galleries, London
Private Collection, New York (sold: Sotheby's, London, June 26, 1990, lot 53)
Private Collection, Sweden (acquired at the above sale)
Private Collection, New York
Michelle Rosenfeld Gallery, New York
Private Collection, New Jersey (acquired from the above, 1994 and sold: Sotheby's, New York, May 4, 2005, lot 211)
Acquired at the above sale by the present owner

Georges Bauquier, Fernand Léger, 1938-1943, Le catalogue raisonné de l'oeuvre peint, Paris, 1995, no. 992, illustrated p. 34

In 1938, Léger visited the United Sates for the third time and the energy of New York undoubtedly infused his paintings during this period. The present painting, Composition aux trois fruits, belongs to this creative time. In this work, the emphasis is abstract and biological. Fruit and plants, geometrical shapes, all schematic, are positioned against a geometrical background. Curved elements create a balance with the straight and right-angled lines. Léger confirmed the principle of visual contrasts as a determining feature of this work. This rule had its expression in the machinist easel paintings of the early 1920s and in the organic compositions that followed. The background shows an architectural motif of flat colored planes enclosed into geometrical forms. In the foreground the fruit are floating, suspended above the geometric background. As Léger explained, "I placed objects in space so that I could not place an object on a table without diminishing its value. I selected an object, chucked the table away. I put the object in space, minus the perspective. Minus anything to hold it there. I then had to liberate the color to an even greater extent." (Dora Vallier, 'La Vie fait l'oeuvre de Fernand Léger,'  Cahier d'Arts, no. 2, 1954, pp. 152-153).