Michelle Rosenfeld Gallery, New York

Executed on cream wove paper. Taped to a window mat on the verso along the edges. Sheet is slightly time-darkened. Some minor pigment shrinkage in the larger yellow circle near center. Otherwise fine, work is in excellent condition.
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Étude pour "La Grande Parade" is one of the preparatory works for Léger's monumental masterpiece of 1954, La Grande Parade, now in the collection of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. It manifests Léger's method of tireless experimentation with the same themes in a wide spectrum of adaptations and interchanges. Léger recognized this process as salient to his output: "The more I watch myself, the more I see that I am a classic. I do long preparatory work. First I do a quantity of drawings, then I do gouaches, and lastly I pass on to the canvas; but when I tackle that I have 80 percent assurance. I know where I'm going" (quoted in Werner Schmalenbach, Fernand Léger, London, 1991, p. 126).

Léger had been developing ideas for La Grande Parade since as early as 1940, with a highly finished drawing of acrobats and musicians, a theme to which he returned in the 1950s. In the preparatory series of La Grande Parade gouaches, the figures are variously juxtaposed beside climbing acrobats, horses, and wheels. For Léger, performance and the circus was a passion: "If I have drawn circus people, acrobats, clowns, jugglers, it is because I have taken an interest in their work for thirty years... A year elapsed between the first state of The Great Parade and its final state. This interval corresponds to a lengthy process of elaboration and synthesis. The slightest transformation was long pondered and worked up with the help of new drawings. A local alteration often involved changing the entire composition because it affected the balance of the whole" (ibid., p. 126).