Mechanical Elements

By 1920 Léger had been back from the war for two years, and the thing that stayed with him was the machinery. He had spent time in the trenches at Verdun, where he later said the gleaming breech of a field gun taught him more than any museum. In this canvas there is no actual machine, only its parts: cones, cylinders and flat discs bolted and stacked into a bright, humming construction. Léger called shapes like these his mechanical elements, and for a few years around 1920 they crowded out people almost entirely and stood in for figures on the canvas. The polished tubes catch a hard studio light, the way a lathe-turned part would. He built pictures the way a workshop builds an engine, from stock parts that could be swapped and repeated.