René Gaffé, Brussels (acquired circa 1925; until 1949)
Galerie Louise Leiris, Paris (acquired in 1949)
Svensk-Franska Konstgalleriet, Stockholm (acquired in 1950)
Dr Stina Thyselius-Lundberg, Drottningholm, Sweden (acquired by 1954; until 1981)
Galerie Nathan, Zurich (acquired in 1981)
Private Collection (acquired from the above)
Thence by descent to the present owner

Stockholm, Liljevalchs Konsthall, Från Cézanne till Picasso, 1954, no. 179
Stockholm, Moderna Museet, Léger, 1964, no. 1
Cologne, Josef-Haubrich-Kunsthalle, Kubismus - Künstler, Themen, Werke, 1907-1920, 1982, no. 72, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
London, Tate Gallery, The Essential Cubism, 1907-1920, 1983, no. 95, illustrated in colour in the catalogue (as dating from mid-1911)
Tokyo, The Bunkamura Museum of Art; Marugame, Marugame Genichiro Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art; Nagoya, Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art & Ibaraki, The Museum of Modern Art, Fernand Léger, 1994, no. 1, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Paris, Musée National d'Art Moderne & Madrid, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Fernand Léger, 1997-98, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Paris, Hôtel de Ville, Paris sous le ciel de la peinture, 2000, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Tübingen, Kunsthalle, Henri Rousseau. Der Zöllner, Grenzgänger zur Moderne, 2001, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Tübingen, Kunsthalle, Die Kunst des Handelns: Meisterwerke des 14. bis 20. Jahrhunderts bei Fritz und Peter Nathan, 2005-06, no. 168, illustrated in colour in the cata♏logue

Andreas Franzke, 'Die Landschaft im Kubismus', in Kubismus – Künstler, Themen, Werke, 1907-1920, Cologne, 1982, illustrated p. 102
Georges Bauquier, Fernand Léger. Catalogue raisonné de l'œuvre peint, 1903-1919, Paris, 1990, no. 32, illustrated in colour p. 59
Jolanda Nigro Covre, Astrattismo - Temi e forme dell'astrazione nelle avanguardie europee, Milan, 2002, illustrated in colour p. 198

The canvas is unlined. Apart from some very small retouchings in the white pigment towards the left of the upper edge, visible under ultra-violet light, this work is in very good condition. Colours: Overall fairly accurate in the printed catalogue illustration, although slightly deeper, richer and more contrasted in the original.
"In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective, qualified opinion. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

'My painting will always embody dynamic tendencies [...]: mo🎐ving forms coloured by local hues, and oppositions of contrasts in order to br🦹ing out this movement. The smoke series: contrasts of soft and hard forms; the series of women: same thing.'

Fernand Léger

 

 

The magnificent Les fumées sur les toits marks a decisive step in Léger's celebrated studies of contrasting forms. Clearly offset from the restrained manner of execution of other paintings in the Fumées series, the present painting is distinguished by often bold, substantial brushwork in a wide array of colours. Departing from an exciting range of greys and whites, it includes subtle ochre, olive, soft purple and rose, as well as some stunning marks of signal red which Léger deployed to such brilliant effect in his art henceforth. Combining this with increasingly salient contrasts of angular and rounded volumes, the painting exudes all the vigour and excitement the artist must have felt as he moved into unexplored territory. The only painting of the series with a pronounced upright format, the composition of Les fumées sur les toits unfolds in a soari♛ng dance of advancing and receding forms, culminating in the daring, upwardly pointing triangular shape at the top.

 

'My painting will always embody dynamic tendencies [...]: moving forms coloured by local hues, and oppositions of contrasts in order to bring out this movement. The smoke series: contrasts of soft and hard forms; the series of women [fig. 4]: same thing' (F. Léger in a letter to Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, 11th December 1919, published in Hommage à Léger, Paris, 1971, pp. 4-5). In these laconic but highly poignant words, Léger summed up his groundbreaking years between 1910 and 1914. The contrast of soft and hard forms, smoke and rooftops, so brilliantly amalgamated in Les fumées sur les toits, was perceived by the artist himself as a turning point: the subject of the first coherent group of paintings in his œuvre, the Fumées series initiated an extraordinary succession of works, some of which he simply came to title Contraste de formes.

 

Léger probably began to study these rooftop views in 1911 when he moved into a new studio located at 13 rue de l'Ancienne Comédie. A photograph taken there in 1972 (fig. 1) shows the Quartier Latin towards Notre Dame, virtually as it must have appeared at the time. In tackling the subject, the artist first chose a restrained, almost monochromatic approach, applying only small quantities of paint (fig. 2). As he moved along, however, his brushwork grew bolder, his colours more vivid. Commenting on this transition, Léger later wrote: 'The subtleties of Cézanne were over in 1912. I did not return to them. Now the colours came to life [...]. I wanted to arrive at hues that stood by themselves: a very red red, a very blue blue. Delaunay moved towards nuance [fig. 3] while I moved towards the purity of colour and volume. [...] In 1912 I found pure colours inscribed into a pure geometric form' (quoted in Gaston Diehl, F. Léger, Paris, 1985, p. 19).




In the catalogue of The Essential Cubism exhibition (Tate Gallery, 1983), Douglas Cooper and Gary Tinterow wrote about Léger's rooftop cityscapes: 'The first works in the group [...] were panoramic scenes which displayed a wide view north-east across the Left Bank towards the cathedral of Notre-Dame to the east. The scene Léger depicted was wider than the eye could take in at a glance, so he obliged himself to condense various points of view while describing the variety of buildings placed at odd angles to one another, each sprouting an array of dormers and chimney-pots. Among these he interspersed plumes of smoke, whose volumes and immateriality served by contrast to reduce the jumble of walls and roofs to the planar structure of a stage set. The effect was heightened in subsequent works with different views, such as the 'Rooftops' exhibited here [the present work], where the mass of the buildings is diminished by pale, chalky colours, strong contours and restrained modelling.' (D. Cooper & G. Tinterow in The Essential Cubism, 1907-1920 (exhibition catalogue), op. cit., p. 204).

 

The present canvas, not dated by Léger, was placed by Cooper and Tinterow after the largest painting of the series formerly in the Minneapolis Institute of Art (fig. 7), while Bauquier assigns it to 1912, a dating which fully accords with the artist's own account cited above (G. Diehl, op. cit.). Indeed, a drawing in the Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart (fig. 6), also assigned to 1912 by Andreas Franzke in an in-depth study of the series (Jahrbuch der Staatlichen Kunstsammlungen in Baden-Württemberg, vol. 15, 1978, pp. 75-93), compares closely both in format and in composition with the present painting (then unknown to Franzke). The drawing was probably made in preparation for the latter and both offer a quintessential synthesis of the panoramic vistas, near and distant, as they presented themselves t꧟o the artist (fig. 1).

 

For many years, Les fumées sur les toits had belonged to the Belgian journalist and writer René Gaffé, an early and highly perceptive collector of avant-garde art. In 1949 it passed through the celebrated gallery of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, the dealer who had offered Léger his first contract in 1913. Hidden in a Swedish private collection from the 1950s onward, the painting was reproduced in the literature only after it came to the well-known Galerie Nathan in 1981. From then on, the importance of Les fumées sur les toits was fully recognised. Placed in Bauquier's catalogue raisonné at the culminating end of the Fumées series, it was chosen as the sole representative of these rooftop views in The Essential Cubism exhibition of 1983 (Tate Gall💃ery, London) and in the importa🃏nt monographic show devoted to Fernand Léger at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris in 1997.

 

The importance of Léger's Fumées paintings had been understood from the start. Their seminal role is emphasised in early publications by such prominent authors as Albert Gleizes & Jean Metzinger (Du 'Cubisme', Paris, 1912), Guillaume Apollinaire (Les Peintres Cubistes, Paris, 1913), and Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler (Der Weg zum Kubismus, Munich, 1920), as well as in later texts such as the studies by John Golding (Cubism. A History and an Analysis, London, 1959), Douglas Cooper (The Cubist Epoch, London & New York, 1971) and Christopher Green (Léger and the Avant-Garde, New Haven & London, 1976). Apart from other innovations, the Fumées series introduces Léger's use of strong outlines in black, a formal device which further enhances the effects of contrast and which he was to use systematically from then onwards (Georges Bauquier, Fernand Léger. Vivre dans le vrai, Paris, 1987, p. 50).

 

Discussing the evolution of the Fumées paintings, Cooper and Tinterow observed: 'The large shapes wheeling among the clouds are non-representational forms inserted by Léger to contrast with the scene depicted beneath. These become more assertive in later works in the series, and two years later Léger made their inclusion a major preoccupation. What once had been a 'battle of volumes' thus yielded to the initial formulations of Léger's theory of contrasts, which dominated his painting until it was interrupted by the declaration of war in August 1914' (D. Cooper & G. Tinterow, op. cit., p. 204).

 

Judging from a lecture by Léger at the Académie Wassilieff in 1914, he himself keenly recognised the strong impressions conveyed by these paintings: 'Take the visual effect of curved and round smokes rising between houses: if you intend to translate their three-dimensional value, they provide the best example for your research of multiplying intensities. Concentrate your curvatures with the utmost variation, but without dissolving them; then frame these with the hard and dry surfaces of the houses – dead surfaces which rise against living forms and which become mobilized by colours that contrast with the central mass [of smoke]: you will thus achieve a maximum effect' (F. Léger, 'Les Réalisations Picturales Actuelles', in Soirées de Paris, 15th June 1914, p. 353).

 

Given his groundbreaking innovations, it is usually agreed that Léger made decisive contributions to the Cubist movement, although judging from the statement cited above (G. Diehl, op. cit.) Léger himself may have preferred comparisons with the work of Delaunay, whose Orphism (fig. 3) shares some of the interests also pursued in the present Les fumées sur les toits. Nevertheless, as the authors of The Essential Cubism put it, apart from Braque, Picasso and Gris, 'only one other artist, Fernand Léger – and he for only three years (1910-13) – can be said to have painted a series of truly Cubist works' (D. Cooper & G. Tinterow, op. cit., p. 14). The present work is one of them.𓆉 It is a significant milestone along Léger's always independent, highly energetic quest for effects of contrasting colour꧂s and forms.

 

 

Fig. 1, A view from Léger's studio at 13, rue de l'Ancienne Comédie, Paris. Pho꧒tographed by Christopher Green in 1972

Fig. 2, Fernand Léger, Fumées sur les toits, 1911, oil on canvas🎐, Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe

Fig. 3, Robert Delaunay, Tour Eiffel, 1911, oil on canvas, The Solomon Rღ. Guggenheim Museum, New York&🧸nbsp;  

Fig. 4, Fernand Léger, Etude pour 'La femme en bleu', 1912-13, 🅠oil on canvas. Sold: Sotheb꧑y's, New York, 7 May 2008

Fig. 5, Fernand Léger, La Fumée, 1912, oil on canvas, Albriꦫght Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo

Fig. 6, Fernand Léger, Etude pour 'Les Fumées sur les toits', 1912, ink on paper, Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart

Fig. 7, Fernand Léger, Fumées sur les toits, 1911, oil on canvas, Private 🅺Collection (formerly at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minneapolis)