  |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Data |
|
Catalogue Text |
|
Biography |
|
Zoom |
|
|
While it was Picasso and Braque who discovered a new pictorial language which represented a complete break with earlier painting, it was Léger who adapted the new artistic style to the modern era. He set out to capture the contrasts of modern life through pictorial contrasts and attempted to find a new type of beauty in the modern world, combining Cubism with the use of colour. He realised this aesthetic program in the series which he called Contrast of Forms of 1913 and 1914 and which marks the culmination of his career during the period prior to World War I.
In this series, despite of its almost abstract pictorial language, there is a clear intent to represent the human figure, a dehumanised and mechanised figure which blends into its fragmented surroundings which represent the world of the machine and of technology. In contrast with the flatness characteristic of the most orthodox Cubism, Léger aimed to give his figures a feeling of physical volume: "I counter curves and straight lines, smooth surfaces and modelled forms." This led him to use tubular forms with concave and convex planes and mechanical rhythms, constructed on the basis of the contrast of pure colours.
Christopher Green (1995) has referred to a letter by Léger written in Normandy in 1914 in which he mentions a group of works entitled The Staircase derived from his abstract investigations into contrasts of forms and colours. In the catalogue raisonné of Léger's work by Georges Bauquier (1990) the Thyssen Staircase is included together with five other works of the same title now in the Kunsthaus, Zurich; the Kunstmuseum, Basel; the Moderna Museet, Stockholm; the Kunstmuseum, Winterthur and The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
In the present painting, which is subtitled Second State, a group of dehumanised figures constructed through cylindrical forms are descending a staircase in which we can clearly see the rail in foreshortening and a few yellow steps on the right of the composition. The tubular forms, outlined by the black lines of the contours, acquire volume through a few touches of red, blue and yellow which only partly cover the surface, leaving the rest of the canvas visible. Depth is achieved through the superimposition of planes and forms, and although there is no defined light source Léger uses a few brushstrokes of white to highlight certain areas and increase the three dimensionality of the cylindrical forms.
Movement, which is created through the seeming rotation of the various articulated elements of the figures and through their advance towards the spectator, put Léger into the context of other contemporary artists who were interested in representing scenes of movement, such as his friend Robert Delaunay, Marcel Duchamp-whose Nude Descending the Staircase of 1911 was shown in the Salon of the Section d'Or in 1912-or the Italian Futurists, with whom Léger shared an interest in depicting the mechanisation and speed of modern life.
Finally, the representation of contrast, the fragmentation and the simultaneity of the modern city, which Léger reflected in his canvas, must be related to the exaltation of the modern city and the depiction of the fragmented "I" in space and in time, as found in the contemporaneous poetry of Guillaume Apollinaire. The notion of simultaneity to which the title of the series, Contrast of forms, refers, is the same which Apollinaire posited in his poetry from 1912. His poem Zone of 1912 translates his own experience of the modern city and offers a kaleidoscope of images through new poetic means, such as free verse and the aesthetic of simultaneity and fragmentation.
Paloma Alarcó
|
|
|
