Summer (from The Four Seasons cycle)

Summer is one of four canvases Léger gave to the seasons in 1928. Instead of a summer scene, a field or a crowded beach, he offers the season as pure composition, strong flat colour and firm rounded forms held in balance. It is the sort of broad, timeless subject he was drawn to, one with no single anecdote to tell and plenty of room to work out a problem of form. The whole thing reads as a design in warm colour, the season carried in his own cool, ordered language. It hangs in Basel with its three companion canvases.