Still Life

Taking his cue from cubism and futurism, Fernand Léger developed his own pictorial universe and a distinctive style related to machines and mechanical processes. His imagery was often culled from the era’s industrialized, urban life, as executed in a dynamic idiom featuring bold contours, condensed spatial effects, and planes of pure colour. Léger embraced the industrialized world’s technology and production methods, as well as its array of new media and pop culture items.

Léger had several links to the Nordic countries. In the latter half of the 1910s, he worked in close collaboration with the Norwegian painter Thorvald Hellesen. Through his efforts as a teacher in Paris in the mid-1920s, he also became an important source of inspiration for several Nordic artists, including Otto G. Carlsund, Franciska Clausen, and Ragnhild Keyser.

Léger refined his “mechanical aesthetics” in the years following the First World War. Mechanical forms, colours, and surfaces were used to articulate a visual dynamism and plastic intensity. The painting at hand belongs to a series of smaller works based on simple still-life images, executed in 1926 and 1927. A large, vertical jar shape dominates the picture: it establishes a sense of peace and stability, but the depiction’s fragmentary structure and its play with distinct, overlapping pictorial layers create movement and rhythm. Forms, lines, and colours are repeated and contrast with one another. Léger thereby explores a classical genre and an archaic, age-old object from everyday life, giving them a modern treatment.