Two Figures (Nudes on a Red Ground)

Right after the war a lot of French painters swung back toward order and calm, reaching for solid, classical figures again. Léger joined that turn in his own way. Here two nude women fill a flat red field, and he has built their bodies out of exactly the same polished cylinders he used for pipes and pistons. Arms and torsos gleam like turned metal, monumental and still, with no expression and almost no individual feature. He painted a companion to this in the same years, a mother and child now hanging in the same Basel collection. The women do not stand in a room so much as lock together like parts of one machine, holding the whole red surface in place.