The Three Comrades

In 1919 and 1920, back in Paris after the war, Léger worked his way toward this canvas through a run of small gouaches on paper. One of them, signed and dated 1919, now belongs to the museum in Ulm, in southern Germany. It holds a single figure assembled from cylinders, discs and plates, standing among abstract shapes that here and there settle into something like a factory hall or the girders of a bridge. In the painting that one figure has become three, yet the pose, the composition and the colours stay almost the same. A few small things made the journey intact, an object shaped like an egg cup, a cigarette and a ball. In the Ulm study the figure also grips a walking stick with a round knob, the most realistic thing Léger put on the whole sheet.