Woman Holding a Vase

Around 1920 many European artists were pulling back from the fractured look of pre-war Cubism toward something calmer and more solid, a mood often called the return to order. Léger's answer was figures like this one, a standing woman holding a vase, put together from firm rounded volumes and clear flat colour. The pose is old, almost classical, the upright and self-possessed stance you might find in an antique statue, yet everything is rendered in his cool modern vocabulary. He liked the motif of a woman with a vase enough to rework it more than once during these years, testing how far a human figure could move toward the clarity of a manufactured object while staying recognisably a person. Here she stands frontal and still, holding her vase as steadily as a column holds a roof.