Fernand Léger's 'Les Trois Musiciens'

Fernand Léger's 'Les Trois Musiciens' oil on canvas will be up for auction at Sotheby's New York. This work is part of Sotheby's Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale. It carries an estimate of $2 to $3 million dollars. Fernand Léger painted this work in 1932. Fernand Léger's 'Les Trois Musiciens' is one of the first times that we see Fernand Léger devote so much of his canvas to vibrant color. The vestiges of Purism and the shadowy gradations of his Surrealist-era compositions were slowly fading out of focus as he turned his artistic attention to the explosive power of a bright palette. In the years that followed his completion of the present work, Fernand Léger would increasingly invest his large-formatted canvases with broad swathes of unmodulated color. The present work marks one of his first and most successful applications of the technique.

Sotheby's Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale
November 4th, 2009
http://www.sothebys.com