Divers on a Yellow Background, 1941 Fernand Leger (1881-1955)

We create our paintings with museum quality and covering the highest academic standards. Once we get your order, it will be entirely hand-painted with oil on canvas. All the materials we use are the highest level, being totally artist graded painting materials and linen canvas.

We will add 1.6" (4 cm) additional blank canvas all over the painting for stretching.

High quality and detailing in every inch are time consuming. The reproduction of Fernand Leger also needs time to dry in order to be completely ready for shipping, as this is crucial to not be damaged during transportation.
Based on the size, level of detail and complexity we need 8-9 weeks to complete the process.

In case the delivery date needs to be extended in time, or we are overloaded with requests, there will be an email sent to you sharing the new timelines of production and delivery.

TOPofART wants to remind you to keep patient, in order to get you the highest quality, being our mission to fulfill your expectations.

We not stretch and frame our oil paintings due to several reasons:
Painting reproduction is a high quality expensive product, which we cannot risk to damage by sending it being stretched.
Also, there are postal restrictions, regarding the size of the shipment.
Additionally, due to the dimensions of the stretched canvas, the shipment price may exceed the price of the product itself.

You can stretch and frame your painting in your local frame-shop.

Once the painting Divers on a Yellow Background is ready and dry, it will be shipped to your delivery address. The canvas will be rolled-up in a secure postal tube.

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The paintings we create are only of museum quality. Our academy graduated artists will never allow a compromise in the quality and detail of the ordered painting. TOPofART do not work, and will never allow ourselves to work with low quality studios from the Far East. We are based in Europe, and quality is our highest priority.

Yellow presses forward like a hot wall, and against it a knot of bodies tumbles, turns, and suspends itself in midair. Fernand Leger gives us divers without water, a daring choice that makes the sensation stranger and clearer. Limbs overlap with the confidence of a juggler: a foot planted on nothing, a hand raised as if to brace for impact, a head inverted, eyes closed to the world. Around them, flat islands of cobalt, red, black, and small mossy greens behave less like scenery than like pulses.

This is Divers on a Yellow Background (1941), and its joy is deliberately constructed. Depth barely exists. Everything is pushed up to the surface, as if the painting were a poster and the figures were cut-outs pinned in place. Yet the bodies are not cold. Leger models them in smoky greys, with soft transitions that give elbows and calves a heavy, human weight. One detail sticks with me: the fingernails are carefully picked out, each a pale, neat oval, and that tiny fussiness makes the whole tangle feel bodily, not symbolic.

Notice how the black shapes behind the group act like a cushion. They read as shadow, but also as a kind of stage padding, letting the divers ricochet without harm. The paint handling supports this double role: edges are crisp, but the grey shading has a sprayed, airbrushed look, so the figures hover between cartoon and sculpture. Perhaps that is the point. Leger, long drawn to social equality and the idea of a broad public for modern art, strips away anecdote and still keeps the human presence central.

The motif comes from his memory of swimmers diving from the docks at Marseilles, reworked while he was in the United States during World War II. One might imagine the noise that is missing here: the slap of skin, a sharp intake of breath, laughter bouncing off boards. Compared with Matisse’s later cut-outs, which float like pure decoration, Fernand Leger insists on impact and mechanics - bodies as communal energy. Standing before it at the Art Institute Chicago Illinois, you feel that energy in your own shoulders, as if you too were about to tip forward into space.