Gouache, watercolor and pencil on paper, 1950. 313x440 mm; 12½x17½ inches. Initialed and dated in gouache, lower right recto.
This work is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from the Comité Léger, Paris, November 27, 2023, and will be included in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné in preparation by the Comité Léger with the registration number FL-2023-11-000480.
Exhibited: "An Intimate View of Fernand Léger," Blue Moon Gallery/Lerner-Heller Gallery, New York, October 8-November 9, 1974, number 247 (as La Maison jaune et l'abre vert); "Fernand Léger," Staatliche Kunsthalle, Berlin, October 24, 1980-January 7, 1981, number 354 (as La Maison jaune et l'abre vert).
Provenance: Gallery Wolfgang Ketterer, Munich, June 6, 1972, lot 958 (as La Maison jaune et l'abre vert); Robert Stein, Philadelphia; Blue Moon Gallery, New York; private collection, Chicago.
For Léger (1881-1955) the theme of rooftops presented a turning point in his career, in the early 1910s, and was a motif to which he returned frequently to plumb creative material, including in the current rooftop view of 1950. According to the Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, The Netherlands, which held a survey exhibition of Léger's rooftop views, "Fernand Léger and the Rooftops of Paris," November 19, 2022-April 2, 2023, "In 1911 [Léger] moves into a studio on the top floor of a building on the rue de l'Ancienne-Comédie, which overlooks the roofs and smoking chimneys of the Latin Quarter. He uses this view to force a breakthrough in his work. In the series of works created there, entitled Fumées sur les toits (Smoke over the Rooftops), Léger proceeds from relatively realistic and monochrome towards increasingly abstract and colorful. The series thus becomes stepping stone to the cubist work he creates in the period 1911 to 1914."
