Acrobats in the Circus

By late 1918 the fighting in France was finally winding down, and Léger, just discharged from the army, threw himself back into painting with one subject above all: the circus. He kept going to the Cirque Médrano, a permanent circus hall up in Montmartre, and over that year made several canvases of its performers. This is the largest. Its acrobats are assembled from bright cylinders and cones, arms and legs machined smooth like parts turned on a lathe, tumbling through a scaffolding of poles and rings so that the whole surface seems to spin. The circus was cheap, popular entertainment coming back to life as the war ended, and Léger treated these tumblers with the same relish he gave to modern machinery. He would return to the ring for the rest of his life, and more than 30 years later published a whole illustrated book simply called Cirque.