Fernand LEGER - ROSE ET FIGURE, 1931 Fernand Léger began to study the object from 1925 to 1934, strongly influenced by technological developments and especially the cinema*. Two separate phases distinguish this period. He began with monumental still lifes composed of objects majestically presented in such admirable works as Parapluie et chapeau melon dated 1926 (fig. 1), and followed these with a series where the object is dispersed and poses alone in space "with no perspective and no supporting surface", such as Rose et figure dated 1931. This fresh approach to pictorial representation of the object led the artist to search for and, more importantly, choose his objects with care - flints, leaves torn from trees, flowers picked fresh from the lawn, gloves, fruit, scissors, books, and also siphons, coffeepots, or even a part of the human body, the hand. All these objects, these "things", have one thing in common: they belong to the ordinary world of everyday life. Fernand Léger sought to "recreate them plastically", to give them new dignity. He thus studies them carefully, dissects them, in a sense, to reach that perfect resemblance. Straight lines give way to curves, flat areas of colors to folds - in short, geometry gives way to natural form. Rose et figure dates from 1931. It is a unique work, a painting apart. It combines the face of a woman with a rose, a highly symbolic rapprochement in that it refers to an episode in Ferdand Léger's love life, his encounter with Simone Herman** in 1931. This was the beginning of an extraordinary sentimental odyssey resulting in a correspondence of over two hundred letters by 1940. She is "Bijou" (jewel), he is "l'Ours" (the bear). Their walks in the forest of Fontainebleau and along the beaches of the town of Dieppe fed his fascination with the object as he discovered stones and branches polished by the sea, which he began to draw in both pencil and ink. Isabelle Monod-Fontaine writes***: "Although the drawings resemble the models, their resemblance as drawings is even more striking, and they all resemble Simone - as Léger himself said. Although if you play the Surrealist game of 'what if', you would agree that the 'portrait' that most resembles Simone is a canvas dating from 1931 with the chivalrous title of La Rose... A rose depicted with a hundred folded petals, shadowed and slightly purple, sculpted and precise, small, yet infinite. This is an absolute triumph of the fold, with no calm surface to rest the eye. We are far from La Ville and its public. On the contrary, we have entered an intimate world, but nothing is revealed! Léger is no Picasso, and a rose is a rose ..." See continuation