Works by Fernand Léger

Fernand Léger built his own cubism out of cylinders, which critics nicknamed Tubism, and from 1917, after the trenches, he gave people and objects alike sleek, machine-like forms.

Léger trained as an architect and worked as an architectural draughtsman before he took painting seriously at 25. He served two years in the Argonne and nearly died in a mustard gas attack at Verdun in 1916; he later said that the breech of a gun shining in the sun made him forget the abstract art of 1912–13. From 1918 he painted disks that suggest traffic lights. In Le Cirque Médrano of that year, rings of blue, yellow and orange crowd against grey, shaded cylinders, with stencilled letters from the circus's name and small figures caught in the gaps.

The 1920s pictures return to old subjects, mothers with children, nudes, people in a landscape. In his animated landscapes of 1921 the hard outlines and smooth, blended colour often recall Henri Rousseau. In Mother and Child, with a dog under the table, from 1920, the woman in pink is stacked from cylinders, the child is made of grey and white tubes, and the round tabletop tilts up to show the fruit and bread on it. Woman with a Vase, 1924, faces straight out; her grey skirt is fluted like a column, and her hands on the red vase read as part of its pattern.

From 1927 irregular, organic shapes slowly gained ground. In Contrastes d'objets of 1930 a bunch of keys lies over a quartered disk, its longest key crossing a brown nude who lifts a green cloth.

Sources: Wikipedia, SMK – National Gallery of Denmark, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Kunsthaus Zürich.