Woman and Child (Mother and Child)

By 1922 the war was four years gone, and much of Europe was busy rebuilding with new factories and new machinery. Léger, who had served in the trenches, carried that world into one of the oldest subjects in Western art. This mother and child are built from polished cylinders and cones, their limbs turned as smooth as parts off a lathe and set against flat bands of black, grey and colour. Critics had a name for the manner, tubism. The canvas is large, over two metres wide, and the two figures fill it with a calm, monumental stillness that suited the mood many artists wanted in those years, a steadying return to solid, ordered forms after the chaos. The woman's face is a clean oval with almost no expression, and the child sits stiff and upright in her arms like one more of the smooth shapes around them.