Fernand Léger

The theme of the seated woman was one that preoccupied not only Cézanne, Picasso and Braque, but also Léger, as his works in the Fondation Beyeler impressively show. His monumental Woman in an armchair, seemingly made up of sections of metal armour, is seated in an armchair and has rested her ‘paw’ beside a coffee cup in the lower right-hand corner. Léger is here opposing the idea that a painter must create illusion. For in truth, this is not really a seated woman, but an image built up out of individual brush strokes. Léger enlarges the strokes into modules that resemble segments of a suit of armour, from which he composes the body of the woman, and gives this construction a colour tonality drawn from the sphere of complementary colours. He thereby creates a work that addresses both reality and painting at the same time.

After his profound experience of the First World War, Léger’s art changed. He increasingly allowed the sounds and rhythms of the modern life that surrounded him in the metropolis to flow into his pictures, and strove towards an art of precise, monumental cheerfulness. The clock is packed with highly diverse elements of an industrialized urban culture. Mooring ropes are visible on the right, and in the centre parts of machines, snatches of adverts and the clock of the title, which precisely dates the creative moment. The relationship between background and foreground is new: there is no unifying ground against which specific objects stand out. Rather, the different spatial planes interlock to form a crowded composition that, as a whole, is not tied into any shared construction of space.

Powerful black lines – of which two additionally serve as table legs in a representational manner – fix the composition vertically in the pictorial plane, but leave enough space between them for controlled manifestations of three-dimensional space. Equally harmonious is the balance of rounded and angular forms and areas of light and dark, making this picture a masterpiece of modern painting between formal discipline and everyday simplicity.

In Still life with plaster mask, Léger’s particular interest in the representation of sculptural bodies in painting finds expression in the white plaster mask that dominates the composition. The illusion of spatial depth heightens as the eye draws closer from either side of the mask. The most important counter-element in terms of pictorial balance is the disc resembling a fan, which introduces a technological coolness into the composition. It establishes a certain contrast to the gravity radiating from the mask, reminiscent of a death mask. In the shape of a sculpture reproduced in a picture, so Léger seems to be saying here, even man becomes a nature morte.

Standing against a luminous yellow background is a group of acrobats – which at least since Picasso had become a key theme of Modernism in France. The parrots (The acrobats) ranks among the most important of a whole family of paintings in which Léger combines the same or similar figures in changing variations. Characteristic of this is the fact that, although the present picture shows none of the parrots named in the title, one such can nonetheless be seen in a related composition. Overall, we find here a new expression of Léger’s additive principle, which is reiterated in the construction of the individual figures. Thus the arms of the female dancer in the upper left-hand corner, for example, resemble the loose limbs of a jumping jack, drooped in front of the torso. The casual quality of this corporeal construction generates a relaxed monumentality of mural-like character.