- Title
- Letters and Pipes
- Date Made
- c. 1925
- Medium
- Gouache on paper
- Dimensions
- Image: 12 3/4 × 9 1/8 in. (32.39 × 23.18 cm)
Frame: 22 × 18 1/2 × 1 1/4 in. (55.88 × 46.99 × 3.18 cm)
- Accession Number
- 27.7.9
- Collecting Area
- Prints and Drawings
- Curatorial Notes
Fernand Léger was a French painter, sculptor, and filmmaker, widely regarded as a key figure in the development of modern art. Influenced by Cubism starting around 1910, Léger developed a distinctive style characterized by bold geometric forms, vivid colors, and a focus on the industrial and urban world. In the 1920s, when he took up filmmaking, he continued to concentrate on the dynamic interplay between modernity, machinery, and human experience. At the same time, he occasionally applied his signature style to more traditional genres and objects, as in this still-life drawing. An arrangement of pipes and books, the drawing represents a shift from Machine Age Cubism to a modernist version of Classicism, undertaken by Léger and many of his European contemporaries in the aftermath of World War I. Although Léger’s still life retains an avant-garde flatness, the grid comprising the presumed tabletop is orderly, the colors sober, and the white-highlighted bowls and pipe stems volumetric. These same details are found in a closely related painting, dated 1925.
Britt Salvesen
2024
- Copyright
- © Estate of Fernand Léger / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris
