(Argentan 1881–1955 Gif-sur-Yvette)
Étude pour “Les Constructeurs”, 1952, signed with initials and dated, gouache on paper, 22.5 x 28.5 cm, framed

This work is registered in the Comité Léger, Paris, and is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity.
This gouache will be included in the catalogue raisonné currently being compiled by the Comité Léger.

Provenance:
European Private Collection

The subject of constructions workers is one of the best-known projects of the 1940s and early 1950s when it became the primary focus of Légers work.
Léger himself has reported how he came to this subject: “I got the idea travelling to Chevreuse by road every evening. A factory was under construction in the field there. I saw the men swaying high up on the steel girders! I saw man like a flea: he seemed still lost in his inventions with the sky above him. I wanted to render that; the contrast between man and his inventions, between the worker and all the metal architecture, that hardness, that ironwork, those bolts and rivets. The clouds, too, I arranged technically, but they form a contrast with the girders”.
Fernand Léger in: Werner Schmalenbach, Fernand Léger, New York, 1976, page 158.

The present study is taken from the upper section of the large-scale Les Constructeurs, 1951 in the Collection of the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow.