The Mirror

A woman sits with a hand mirror, though you would hardly call the scene intimate. Léger paints her in 1925 with the same polished, manufactured edge he gave to everything else: face, hair and drapery flattened into clean interlocking panels of red, black and white, the round mirror a bright disc among them. Paris in the mid-1920s was full of talk about a return to order after the upheavals of the war years, and many painters went back to calm, classical subjects. Léger took one of the oldest subjects in art, a woman at her mirror, and rebuilt it from modern, machine-smooth shapes. The canvas reached Basel through Raoul La Roche, a Basel-born banker living in Paris who bought Cubist pictures by the roomful and later gave much of his collection to the city's museum.