Nudes in the forest

In the spring of 1911, at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris, one room, number 41, hung a group of young painters together for the first time: Metzinger, Gleizes, Le Fauconnier, Delaunay and Léger. For many visitors it was their first real look at Cubism, and this canvas was Léger's contribution. He had worked on it for about two years. It shows nude figures in a forest, and bodies and tree trunks are made of the same stacked cylinders and cones, in a narrow range of grey, blue-grey, green and white. Léger called it a battle of volumes, and said he had decided to give it almost no colour because the volumes alone were enough. At the left a standing figure raises its arms, and in the centre another sits, both barely separable from the wood around them.