Original Poster for "Fernand Léger. L’art Moderne et la Culture Populaire" at the Sorbonne with a showing of Le Ballet Mécanique Avant la lettre.
Paris: Léon Moussinac - Travail et Culture, 1946. Original lithograph poster before lettering. (see the poster with lettering as the second image).76.5 x 56 cm. Unmounted in A condition. Léger was to speak about popular culture and modern art and his 1924 film Le Ballet Mécanique was to be shown in color at the Sorbonne....
MoMA:
Though he was a painter, Léger experimented with other mediums. He made his foray into film in 1924 with Ballet mécanique (Mechanical ballet), on which he collaborated with artists Dudley Murphy and Man Ray. It opens with a shot of a woman on a swing. Back-and-forth she goes until—suddenly—three bottles of wine, a triangle, a straw hat, and a smiling mouth flash by in rapid, disjointed succession. A brief pause. The camera lingers on the mouth until another burst of disparate images races past. Soon these images—among them kitchenware, machine parts, people, geometric shapes—become kaleidoscopic, multiplying across the frame. Toward the film’s end, Léger includes a headline that screams in block letters: “On a vole un collier de perles de 5 millions” (Pearl necklace worth 5 million stolen)! Like nearly everything else, these letters and numbers break apart, dancing and blinking across the screen....
Ref: Not in Saphire; Judi Freeman, Bridging Purism and Surrealism: The Origins and Production of Fernand Léger's Ballet Mécanique. In: Kuenzli, Rudolf E.: Dada and Surrealist Film, The MIT Press Cambridge / Mass. 1996, p.28 - 45, notably on p. 36. Item #51-4193
Price: $1,500.00