Variant of Vies 1949

Editor: This is Fernand Léger's "Variant of Vies," an ink drawing from 1949. It's a very striking composition, almost claustrophobic with the way the faces and hands overlap. It makes me feel uneasy. What do you see in this piece, beyond the immediate visual impact? Curator: Uneasy, you say? I love that! For me, Léger's work often feels like a dance between order and chaos, doesn’t it? He's working with figuration here, but it verges on abstraction. Look how the lines create these fragmented figures; each face seems to react to something different, or maybe they're all echoes of a single emotion, filtered through different perspectives. Almost like cubism? Editor: Yeah, I see the cubist influence in the fragmentation, for sure. But the expressions... they’re so intense. Are they reacting to something specific, historically speaking, or is it more of a general angst? Curator: That's a fantastic question! Post-war, certainly, and there’s a universality here too. Léger lived through so much. Think about what he witnessed; he found himself looking within and maybe capturing our own attempts to see each other clearly amidst the mess. I can also't help but read in the hands something quite gentle despite what you refer to as the "intense" expressions of the subjects here. See their fingers ever so gently embracing different planes. What would Léger make of such tension of planes rubbing ever so gently? Editor: That's a great point, I missed that! So it's not just about chaos or angst, but maybe about human connection, even in fragmented form. I hadn't really thought about it like that. Thank you! Curator: Exactly! The beauty, or the unease, might lie in how it mirrors our own fragmented selves. Glad to have seen it with you!