Woman with a Cat (Léger)

Woman with a Cat
Artist	Fernand Léger
Year	1921
Medium	Oil on canvas
Location	Metropolitan Museum of Art Hamburger Kunsthalle, New York Hamburg

Woman with a Cat (French: La femme au chat, German: Frau mit Katze) refers to two, almost identical 1921 abstract, post-Cubist paintings of different sizes by French painter and sculptor Fernand Léger (1881–1955). The work represents one of a similar series of female figures produced during his machine aesthetic period in the early 1920s. It depicts a simple composition, with a low key, nearly monochrome nude woman formed by spheres, cones, and tubes with limited colors of red, yellow, black, and white. The paintings are thought to be a study for his later work, Three Women (Le Grand Déjeuner, 1921–1922). The larger work (130.8 × 90.5 cm) was originally part of the Gottlieb Reber collection in Switzerland until 1958; it was eventually sold to Samuel and Florene Marx and then gifted to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1994. The smaller work (97.5 x 70.5 x 5.5 cm) was held by Paul Rosenberg until it was purchased by the Hamburg Art Collections Foundation for the Hamburger Kunsthalle in 1967.

Versions

• 
  Metropolitan Museum of Art
• 
  Hamburger Kunsthalle

Bibliography

• Lippard, Lucy R. (1965). "LEGER. Woman with Cat, 1921." The School of Paris: Paintings from the Florene May Schoenborn and Samuel A. Marx Collection. The Museum of Modern Art. ISBN 087070575X.
• Rewald, Sabine (Fall, 1995). "Recent Acquisitions, A Selection: 1994–1995". The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin. 53 (2). ISSN 0026-1521.

External links

• Description at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
• Description at the Hamburger Kunsthalle.