Still Life

In the Paris of the 1920s a new idea was in the air, that the clean lines of machine-made objects could be a model for modern art. The architect Le Corbusier and the painter Amédée Ozenfant had built a whole movement on it, Purism, and preached it in their magazine L'Esprit Nouveau, the new spirit. Léger kept his own style while sharing their taste for order. This still life is assembled from stable interlocking rectangles, verticals and horizontals locking into place, with a tall jar shape anchoring the centre. The jar gives the picture its calm, and the overlapping flat layers around it keep a quiet rhythm going. By 1927 Léger was near the end of this strict, tidy phase. Within a year or two those hard edges would start giving way to looser, more organic shapes.