Mechanical Element

By 1920 Léger was painting canvases with no machine in them at all, only machine parts. This one packs interlocking discs, pistons and clamps into a shallow, poster-flat space, polished tubes and cones bolted so tightly that the eye keeps sliding around looking for a way in. He called shapes like these his mechanical elements and let them stand on their own, without a figure or a room to anchor them. What is quietly surprising is where the picture ended up, a country estate deep in the Dutch woods at Otterlo. Advised by her teacher Henk Bremmer, Helene Kröller-Müller was building one of Europe's first great collections of modern art, and she reached for this brand-new French abstraction while the paint was barely dry. It belongs to the collection she gave to the Dutch nation, on show at the museum in Otterlo that opened in 1938.