Magnificent and unpublished handwritten letter signed by Fernand Léger about American jazz and colours, addressed to Gaston Criel, author of a pioneering essay on “Swing.”
The painter looks back on his exile in the United States from 1940 to 1945, talks about Louis Armstrong and of his captivating discovery of experimental jazz in New York, in the company of the Afro-American painters of the Harlem Renaissance.
29 lines in black ink, written on one leaf.
The hand-written letter is presented under a half forest green morocco chemise, green paper boards with a stylised motif, endpapers lined with green lamb, slip case lined with the same morocco, the piece is signed by Goy & Vilaine.
Léger replies to Georges Criel and congratulates him on his American jazz essay: “Votre « swing » m'intéresse. Vous avez trouvé un style sonore qui colle au sujet”. “Your ‘swing' interests me. You have found a sound style that suits the subject.” Indeed, in his essay entitled Swing, Criel had adopted the very “bebop” rhythmic style that Léger had had the opportunity to listen to in New York. This first French language study of jazz was unanimously recognised, by the likes of Sartre and Stravinsky, Gide, Senghor and Poulenc. The undated letter was written in 1948, the year Criel's essay was published. After a long exile in the United States between 1940 and 1945, Léger went back to France and joined the communist party . Living in Paris, at the same time he reopened his painting academy in a new location on Boulevard de Clichy, which will bring him an influx of American students, former demobilised GIs such as Sam Francis and Kenneth Noland.
As early as 1924, Léger was acquainted with jazz and America at the same time in his experimental film Ballet mécanique, shot by the Americans Dudley Murphy and Man Ray, on music by Duke Ellington and George Antheil. Three stays in New York between 1931 and 1939, many projects and meetings - particularly with the writer Dos Passos - had familiarised Léger with this city that was emblematic of modernity. However, it was his exile during the war that really introduced him to America and to jazz music: “J'ai pu pendant 5 ans d'Amérique réagir pour ou contre cette expression nègre” “ “I was able, during 5 years of America, to react in favour or against this negro expression.” In 1941, he discovered the country whilst travelling on a bus towards the West, he gave lectures in California and had his Ballet Mécanique screened at the famous experimental university Black Mountain in North Carolina. It is also in the United States that, in 1942, he invented a new use of colour, inspired by the way advertising lights sweep the facades of Time Square: colour is now separated from the drawing, and gives rise to the painting Starfish (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum), his series of “Cyclistes” “Cyclists” (Biot, Musée national Fernand Léger) and the “Plongeurs” “Divers,” of which he produces a enormous copy in 1943 for the architect's house, Rockefeller, Wallace K. Harrison, in Long Island.
Jazz, synonymous with modernity and freedom, was also an opportunity to explore colour. Léger gives his sound experiences a striking synthetic description: “J'ai souvent pensé en les écoutant à des équivalences colorées possibles. Les sardanes espagnols par exemple c'est de la couleur pure. Jaune bleu rouge. Le Jazz comporterait souvent des nuances” “When listening to them I have often thought of the possible colour equivalents. The Spanish Sardanas, for example, are pure in colour. Yellow blue red. Jazz often contains different shades.” He helped in New York's clubs as bebop emerged, a new form of fast-paced jazz with breath-taking skill, whose harmonic and rhythmic innovations left their mark on the painter in his compositions. The painter recalls the discovery of this furious jazz in the 1940s: “La confusion du départ m'intéressait surtout. Leur côté animal instinctif s'y donnant à plein ; des cris sourd aigus. Des bruits incontrolable [sic] ayant une valeur spontanée étonnante, ensuite la domestication de cette jolie sauvagerie s'établissait en bon ou en mal.” “The confusion at the start interested me particularly. Their natural wild side giving its all; loud, shrill cries. The uncontrollable noises having a surprising, spontaneous value, next the domestication of this pretty savagery was established for good or for bad.” The shiny brass instruments with the “cris aigus” “shrill cries” recall the shapes and sounds of the painter's cherished machines that he has used since his “période mécanique” “mechanical period” in the 1920s. He finishes his letter with a vibrant tribute to Louis Armstrong, whilst also resurrecting his past as a soldier: “Armstrong lui ça va plus loin, c'est de l'acier sous la lumière. La magie d'une culasse de 75?ouverte en plein soleil. Éblouissant” “Armstrong goes further, it is steel under the light. The magic of a breech of a 75?open to the direct sunlight. Dazzling”
In permanent search for modernity, Léger immersed himself in the Greenwich Village bohemian life and discovered the Afro-American New York culture, in full swing in the 1940s: “Mes camaraderies de jeunes peintres noirs m'ont permis d'assister à des « entrainements » pour des recherches de jazzs nouveaux.” “My young black painter friends allowed me attend ‘training sessions' to research new jazz.” His contact with the black artistic avant-garde continued in his Parisian painting academy after his departure from the United States, where he taught painter John Wilson, a prominent member of the Harlem Resistance movement, Robert Colescott, and Jamaican Karl Parboosingh. It is also at this point, around 1948, that the young Ellsworth Kelly, an important figure in minimalism, came to ask for guidance. In addition, Léger's style and modernist philosophy left a permanent mark on the American artistic landscape as a precursor to the Pop Art movement.
A rare and unpublished account of Fernand Léger's New York experiences and the sensory impact that jazz had on his painting.
« Cher monsieur Criel,
Votre « swing » m'intéresse. Vous avez trouvé un style sonore qui colle au sujet. J'ai pu pendant 5 ans d'Amérique réagir pour ou contre cette expression nègre.
Mes camaraderies de jeunes peintres noirs m'ont permis d'assister à des « entrainements » pour des recherches de jazzs nouveaux.
La confusion du départ m'intéressait surtout. Leur côté animal instinctif s'y donnant à plein ; des cris sourd aigus. Des bruits incontrolable ayant une valeur spontanée étonnante, ensuite la domestication de cette jolie sauvagerie s'établissait en bon ou en mal.
J'ai souvent pensé en les écoutant à des équivalences colorées possibles. Les sardanes espagnols par exemple c'est de la couleur pure. Jaune bleu rouge. Le Jazz comporterait souvent des nuances. Armstrong lui ça va plus loin, c'est de l'acier sous la lumière. La magie d'une culasse de 75?ouverte en plein soleil. Éblouissant.
FLeger
Fernand Léger »
“Dear Mr Criel,
Your ‘swing' interests me. You have found a sound style that suits the subject. I was able, during 5 years of America, to react in favour or against this negro expression.
My young black painter friends allowed me attend ‘training sessions' to research new jazz.
The confusion at the start interested me particularly. Their natural wild side giving its all; loud, shrill cries. The uncontrollable noises having a surprising, spontaneous value, next the domestication of this pretty savagery was established for good or for bad.
When listening to them I have often thought of the possible colour equivalents. The Spanish Sardanas, for example, are pure in colour. Yellow blue red. Jazz often contains different shades. Armstrong goes further, it is steel under the light. The magic of a breech of a 75?open to the direct sunlight. Dazzling.
FLeger
Fernand Léger »
Significant letter written by René Magritte to André Bosmans, dated 9 January 1965 and signed with his initials. 35 lines in black ink on one leaf with the heading “René Magritte 97, rue des Mimosas, Bruxelles 3 Téléphone 15.07.30”. Several words crossed out and passages underlined.
Published in the Lettres à André Bosmans 1958-1967, Seghers I. Brachot, 1990, pp. 407-408
A letter that is both comical and of great philosophical depth, in which the Surrealist painter René Magritte tackles the question of the imagination and inspiration. In it there is a very pertinent analysis of the issues of aesthetics and of modern thinking, while the painter is seeking inspiration to produce the cover of the next XXe siècle, an avant-garde artistic and literary journal (issue XXV, June 1965).
Magritte addresses this letter to his great friend André Bosmans, a school teacher, poet and editor-in-chief of Rhétorique, a literary journal to which Magritte actively contributed. The painter, then in full mastery of his art, enjoyed international recognition since the beginning of the 1960s. His work has already been the object of numerous retrospectives in France and in Belgium, and will be celebrated on the other side of the Atlantic several months later at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
His letter is divided between humour and psychological reflection. Magritte's usual taste for irony is present: “Here is the extract from the newspaper La Meuse. The serious advice to pregnant women becomes comical when it accompanies this reproduction of a gouache made about thirty years ago. This is probably ‘humour' for serious people?” A daily paper in Liège had indeed taken a Surrealist gouache painting by Magritte, entitled Maternité, where the mother was represented with a baby's face and the baby with the face of a woman, for one of its articles.
After this aside, Magritte provides Bosmans with a draft painting earmarked for a journal (reproduced below): “I don't know yet what I will paint for the cover of the next XXe siècle”. The art journal Le XXe siècle was founded in 1938 by an Italian journalist reporting in Paris, Gualtieri di San Lazzaro, and appeared in the form of an annual notebook on modern art trends, embellished with lithographs and original works. Magritte featured alongside Giorgio de Chirico, his idol, and also Kandinsky, Jean Arp and Joan Miro, as well as numerous other pioneering artists or heirs to Surrealism. Each issue was dedicated to a different current subject, with contributions from critics, artists and writers.
Magritte dissects the title of the next issue for Bosmans (“Aux sources de l'imaginaire” “To the sources of the imaginary”), which according to him, symbolises an entire era that has become the subconscious slave since the Surrealist revolution:“‘The imaginary' perhaps now replaces ‘the ideal' of a previous era. Instead of an ideal museum, it is now an imaginary museum. I believe the proper expression would be: inventory or catalogue of the perfect museum.” Taking André Malraux's well-known paradigm, the “musée imaginaire” “imaginary museum,” Magritte emphases the transition from romanticism to Surrealism: this replacement of the pursuit of an ideal through the opening up on to dreams and the accidental. He also criticizes the XXe siècle's pompous expression: “It is the mediocre imaginary that is responsible (the source, speaking figuratively like the XXe siècle) for that which only has an imaginary value.”
Because for Magritte, there is a fundamental distinction between the imaginary and imagination, between dreams and creation. For this artist, who is profoundly sensitive to the paradoxes of reality and the role of mystery in life and in art, the imagination is nothing without being creative. His paintings based on “hallucinated realism” demonstrate this belief, such as the famous Homme au chapeau melon (private collection, 1964), and even his Empire des lumières series (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the New York MoMA, Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venise, Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts in Belgium, 1953-1954).
The painter offers us his own cryptic and fascinating definition of the imaginary: “Imagination that has power, so as not to confuse it with sterile imagination, should be called: inspiration, when poetry is in question. It does not have to be great or extraordinary. Imagination that is limited to the invention of a machine, or to the solving of a problem (Eureka) is great.” In this passage, it is noteworthy that poetry occupies the top position in the hierarchy of genres, according to Magritte, who throughout his life sought to bring about a “poetic state” in spectators, and even put language in his compositions (L'Apparition, 1928, Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart, La Trahison des images, 1929, Museum of Modern Art in Bruxelles).
He finishes his letter with a most strange conclusion – his own glossary of fantasies:
“I therefore distinguish: Great imagination/ Mediocre imagination/ And inspiration”.
A fascinating letter by Magritte that mixes irony and belief, philosophy and fantasy, at the dawn of the creation of a new work.
One of the most magnificent letters by Fernand Léger
A fabulous handwritten letter by the painter Fernand Léger, written on the front line during the Battle of Argonne, addressed to the Parisian art trader Adolphe Basler.
92 lines in black ink, four pages on a double leaf, dated 28 May 1915 by Léger.
The handwritten letter is presented with a half forest green morocco chemise, green paper boards with a stylised motif, endpapers lined with green lamb, slip case lined with the same morocco, the piece is signed by Goy & Vilaine.
The letter was chosen for Cécile Guilbert's anthology, Les Plus Belles Lettres manuscrites de Voltaire à Édith Piaf, Robert Laffont, 2014.
First edition of which there were no grand papier (deluxe) copies, an advance (service de presse) copy.
Small foxing on covers marginally and slightly sunned, one joint cracked and glued down to foot, a small tear to head of spine.
Illustrated, as frontispiece, with a drawing by Etienne Dinet.
Handsome autograph inscription signed by Etienne Dinet to Georges Rochegrosse : "A G. Rochegrosse cordial souvenir de son vieil ami."
