Still Life (Blue Guitar and Vase)

This small canvas belongs to a run of still lifes Léger painted in 1926 and 1927, each built around a few humble objects, here a tall vase and a blue guitar. He was close in these years to the Purists, the painter Amédée Ozenfant and the architect Le Corbusier, who preached clarity, order and the beauty of ordinary manufactured things. You can see that thinking at work. The big vertical jar anchors the picture and holds it still, while flat coloured planes slide across and behind one another, giving the calm arrangement a quiet rhythm. An object as old and plain as a storage jar gets treated with the seriousness a painter would once have saved for a saint or a king.