Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Fernand Léger
American; 20th-century
New York, NY: Skarstedt Gallery (Exhibition: Fernand Léger: The Mechanical Paintings, 1918-1932)
80%
Le cirque Médrano (Esquisse). 1918. Oil on canvas
Léger's paintings from this period tend to miss the mark either when they lack a focal mass, or when they have one that's just so focal that it stymies the development of the image's all-over cohesion. (His more willfully abstract canvases run into the former issue, the figurative stuff tends to suffer from the latter.) This painting, among the best of Léger's "mechanical" pieces, falls between these two problems. Those two clipped and shaded empanada-forms in grey at the middle of the canvas — at once both planes and full bodies in space — pull in towards themselves the whole picture's din of interlocked surfaces and errant dots and lines, but they also, to an extent, fall out of view alongside the yellows and blues that surround them. Much of the painting (especially its corners) is thereby given license to develop freely, despite the centrifugal force governing the arrangement from its center. (TFS, 2025)
New York, NY: Skarstedt Gallery (Exhibition: Fernand Léger: The Mechanical Paintings, 1918-1932)
64%
Éléments mécaniques. 1922. Oil on board laid down on cradled panel
Even given the slight lurch left of this composition, there's something about it that feels a little overdetermined, almost mathematical. This is Leger at less than his best: arrangement by what seem to be careful proportions, color combinations that are more calibrated than felt (though you have to give it to him for that wedge of lavender in the upper right). At times his mensuration, especially during this "mechanical" period, was able to become more than the sum of its parts, but in this piece it has the look of Cubism long-since regressed, as well as of later hard-edge painting at its most designy. The former is there in the thicketed center of the image, the latter around its edges (especially in those arcs at top left). This isn't to say that this picture, here and there, doesn't recede nicely — perhaps even defiantly, precipitously — into flat and shallow depth, or that Leger's sense for massing was anything other than expert. But in a canvas like this you get some early inklings of what the academization of modern art would be like. It's there, in kernel, in that outlined snake of loud red in the middle, and in Leger's studiously tactile handling of paint. (TFS, 2025)