Sacred Heart of Audincourt 1951

Fernand Léger made this stained glass window, Sacred Heart of Audincourt, and I'm trying to imagine the puzzle of putting it together, each color held in place by those black lines. There’s a tenderness in the way Léger simplifies forms. See how he reduces everything to these basic shapes? It’s like he’s trying to get to the essence of things, the soul of the subject. Those birds in flight, they remind me of Miró, but with a machine-age twist. I wonder if Léger was thinking about Picasso or Braque and their Cubist experiments. How to fracture form and then rebuild it, to see different sides of something all at once? Painting, or in this case, stained glass, it’s a conversation. Artists riffing off each other, borrowing, stealing, and transforming ideas. And for me, that's the best part, the sense of being part of this long, unbroken line of makers.