Fernand Léger, The Seashell, 1928, Stencil

Magnificent stencil print, "The Seashell," based on a gouache by Fernand Léger, from the sought-after monograph on Fernand Léger by Tériade, published in 1928 for Cahiers d'art, in his "Great Painters" collection. This collection included five stencils and black heliogravures, for a total print run of 800 copies. This particular print is on Torpes vellum. A stencil created nearly a century ago, its vibrant colors are still in excellent condition. We know that Fernand Léger actively collaborated with Cahiers d'art, a high-quality art journal, from its inception. A key figure in the Cahiers d'art, this major artist of modern art, and more specifically of Cubism, who also taught at Yale and Mills College during the Second World War (1940-1945), was already featured in the first issue of Cahiers d'art in 1926, and would appear in a total of nineteen issues of this legendary journal, which followed the evolution of his work throughout his life. The monograph published by Efstratios Tériade, a renowned art critic and publisher, from which our stencil is taken, remains probably the most brilliant example of the collaboration between Cahiers d'art and Fernand Léger. "The Seashell" appears to us to be the most successful of this series of five stencils included in this sought-after and highly valued monograph, published in 1928 in an edition of 800 copies. This subject interested Fernand Léger who, a year after the publication of Tériade's monograph, created the oil on canvas "The Seashell" in 1929, which sold for £1.613 million at Christie's on March 5, 2025. While its palette and construction differ, it shares the same underlying theme. Before his vocation for art and painting became clear, Fernand Léger began his studies in architecture. Although he changed course, this architectural dimension is fully evident in the composition and themes of his work. The stencil "The Seashell" affirms his strong identity, a distillation of Fernand Léger's art. The deconstruction of the referent, here drawn from marine life, within a Cubist-inspired composition that contains a kind of enigma, even a rebus (a seashell, a leaf, the letter -R divided in two, a keel-shaped figure rendered in two colors, a half-blue sphere, a plate or globe fertilized by a sun), is presented in a form made magnetic by the use of a particularly vibrant primary color palette. In short, an allegory of human life in symbiosis with nature.
Dimensions: entire sheet: 27.5cm x 21.8cm - artwork only: 20cm x 16cm.
Framed dimensions: 30cm x 24cm (mug size 24cm x 18cm).

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