Galerie Louise Leiris, Paris
Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Paris
Galerie Jan Krugier, Geneva
Private Collection, Germany (acquired from the above in 1975)
Acquired from the above in 1990

Geneva, Galerie Jan Krugier, Fernand Léger, 1975, no. 2

Work is in very good condition. Executed on buff-colored card, not laid down. Sheet is fixed to mount at two points along upper edge. Small remnants of old framer's tape visible on verso. There are artist's pinholes in each of the corners. There is some very minor scuffing along the extreme perimeter of the sheet and a small flattened crease across the upper left corner. Sheet is very lightly time-darkened.
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Peter de Francia writes of this period in Léger's career: “To others, and especially the German Expressionists, the chaos of the aftermath of 1918 was the material from which their work in part derived. Léger’s realization was that the equation constituting art: the artist, a system of language and the world, has decisively collapsed. The sudden consciousness of this explains the frantic urgency with which he and others sought solutions. In Malevich’s words the old 'green world of meat and bones' had to be opposed by 'the new world of iron.' To Léger, confronted with a new world of manufactured objects and a huge diversity of visual experience, selection became vital, and it is interesting that already in 1919 he refers to a 'mass audience' when writing about the role of a painter. Above all, however, he was concerned with the machine object, defined by him as 'a kind of re-beginning of itself, a rebirth of the initial object,' its aesthetic function, and its setting and birthplace; the image of the modern city being conceived as a twentieth-century metropolis…

"Léger’s 1918 pictures are highly compressed compositions, densely packed and heavily articulated. Paintings such as La Gare (see fig. 1), containing elements based on railway signals, used muted, sometimes slightly muddied colors. The signals, made of sheet metal often perforated with circles, formed part of the familiar panorama crowding the tracks leading from main-line stations and were important to Léger because they were also incongruous intruders into rural and urban landscapes. Small elements resembling metal off-cuts begin to appear in his pictures. Modelled, these elements frequently present the nearer facing segments as rounded, while the further ends tend to be squared and sometimes larger, thus suggesting an ambiguous perspective” (Peter de Francia, Fernand Léger, New Haven & London, 1983, pp. 44-45).

The present work is one of two variations of La Gare which the artist exe𝓡cuted in gouache in 1918, likely in preparation for the final oil. The other gouache, which lacks many of the details seen in both the present work and the oil, was sold at Sotheby's, Paris, June 1, 2011, lot 41. The present work is also the only one of the pair to have been handled by Galerie Louise Leiris, and is accompa😼nied by their photo-certificate (see fig. 2).