Page 32 - Studio International - September October 1975

in his commentary on the Berlin ro0m, room, but also - and as imp0rtantly -
`the aim is to create an abstract space in a two-dimensionally to the wall 0n which
given concrete space with combinati0ns they hung, from which followed concerns
of different colours.'22 And Baldovici, irrelevant to Van Doesburg or Huszar.
commenting on Léger, was equally For Léger in `L'Architecture
certain that his aims as a painter in polychromie', an area 0f pure col0ur
architecture were essentially spatial. 23 could command an area far greater than
In this respect there was clearly a link that it actually covered. And so the
between Léger's murals and Huszar's proportions and intensity of, for instance,
coloured space, for they both attempt at the central red slats that dominate both
once to harmonize with architecture by the Nelson Rockefeller and the Josef
working in flat, stable pictorial elements Muller murals were ideally to be judged
and to challenge the wall by opening up a in relation to the proportions and the
pictorial space within it. Thus, f0r all the c0lour of the wall on which they were
uncompromising flatness of his planar placed as well as the room they
vocabulary, Léger continued in his confronted. But the radiant power of a
murals to play the games with overlapping mural depended as much on the
elements and advancing or retreating positioning of colour planes in relation to
c0l0urs which he had played for years as a the picture-edge, on line as instigator of
Cubist, but with a new simplicity keyed movement towards the edge, and, 0f
to the breadth of their implied course, on the framing of the whole. The
Composition 1924 architectural environment. murals therefore focused Léger's
Oil on canvas, 51 39 in. However, Léger's decision to contain attention in a new way on the peripheries
Ex-coll. E. L. T. Mesens spatial incident within the confines of of the painting.
easel painting led to differences of The photographs of the 1924
international context it is better to look approach which were profound, Composition and Le Balustre in position
at the true murals : the 1924 pair and the separating him from Huszar and Rietveld in the Pavillon show them in broad, dark,
canvases finished in 1925 and 1926 which as well as from Van Doesburg and very emphatic frames. The murals
are represented in Nelson Rockefeller's Van Eesteren. The creation of new proper, however, were almost certainly
collection (1924-5), in the Guggenheim `abstract' spaces was perhaps the central not intended to be framed thus, for the
Museum (1924-5), in the Swiss aesthetic concern which bound together photographs of the Mallet-Stevens
collection of Josef Miller (1925), and in the artists and architects of the Embassy hall installation show that
the de Menil collection (1926).20 The international avant-garde between 1923 Léger's composition was framed if at all
Van Doesburg and Van Eesteren villa and 1925, but men like Van Doesburg, very unobtrusively, while Josef Muller
projects shown in the galerie de l'Eff0rt Moholy-Nagy and Keisler did not has said that he bought his mural from
Moderne in 1923 were not the only consider space in isolation. The spaces of Léger in the twenties framed, as it is now,
De Stijl stimuli behind Léger's new the 1923 De Stijl villa projects were with a thin moulded strip of wood
architectural painting. In precisely the designed to be moved through, their painted dull green, which creates no more
same number of L'Architecture Vivante corners opened up to encourage than the flimsiest of visual boundaries."
as carried his essay `L'Architecture movement, s0 that the experience of The edges of the murals therefore seem to
polychromie' there appeared three views `concrete' and 'abstract' space created by have been judged to relate almost directly
of a room designed by Gerrit Rietveld the overlappings of coloured wall-planes to the walls on which they were placed -
with walls coloured by Vilmos Huszar for constantly changed; the factor of time white walls in Mallet-Stevens's Embassy
a 1923 Berlin exhibition. The black was engaged as a crucial element. hall, but theoretically, if Le Corbusier
and white photographs were retouched in Rietveld's Berlin room was designed to be were architect, any colour in his range.
When Léger decided to close off the left
side of one of his 1924 murals with a
black line and to allow horizontal bars of
black, ochre and green to strike its right
edge unhindered, it was a considered
decision, that much is certain. But the
contextual factors behind the decisi0n -
the intended relationship between this
composition, its wall setting and other
paintings - as with all the murals except
the Embassy hall painting, remain
unknown. The colour range of Léger's
murals and their lack of enclosing black
lines for planes distinguish them from the
compositions of Mondrian : they are too
muted and too spatially active to sustain
close comparison. But in this factor at
least, in the care with which he considered
Room designed by Gerrit Rietveld for a Berlin exhibition, with colour scheme by Vilmos them as expanding centres of force flat on
Huszar, 1923 the wall, Léger was in tune with
Mondrian.
blue, yellow and red where the wall moved in as well, and so Huszar's `We declare,' wrote Van Doesburg and
planes were coloured, the colours keyed colour-planes turned corners to impel the Van Eesteren in 1923, 'that painting
down to something close to the muted eye from one wall-plane to another as well without construction (ie easel painting)
range of Léger's earlier 1924 pair of as to destroy all sense of enclosure. By has no future reason for existence.' 22
murals." But, most significantly, where concentrating spatial play within the Léger's murals may have been abstract
Van Doesburg's 1923 polychromy had closed rectangle 0f an easel painting Léger and may have declared a new alliance with
retained the unity of each wall-plane, discouraged movement of this kind, architecture, but they did not announce
here Huszar challenged that unity, his flat excluded the factor of time and reinforced the death of easel painting. In one further
planes, fl0ating 0n their neutral grey the sense of the wall as a fixed enclosing crucial way Léger's approach to painting
ground (in the illustrations) not only plane however effectively holed by the for architecture differed from that of
overlapping to evoke space in the wall, illusi0n of depth. De Stijl : he did not see the experience
but also turning corners to destroy the Léger's murals are frontal compositions created by the marriage of colour and
distincti0n between 0ne wall and another. and they are related therefore not only construction as self-sufficient. His murals
`For him [Huszar],' wrote Jean Baldovici three-dimensionally to the space of the and the walls on which they might hang
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