Les trois femmes au bouquet 1922

Fernand Léger made this oil painting, Les trois femmes au bouquet, with a devotion to geometric forms and pure, saturated colours. The painting's surface is smooth, almost machine-like, with a precision that echoes industrial design. Look closely, and you'll see the way Léger renders the figures with bold, simplified shapes—cylinders for arms, cones for breasts. This almost robotic approach to the body has a weird allure. It's like he's building people out of spare parts, yet they still manage to hold flowers! I love how he uses these solid blocks of colour to define space and form, almost like a 3D collage. Léger and the German artist, Oskar Schlemmer, both shared an interest in the figure as machine. But where Schlemmer focused on dance and performance, Léger kept his robotic figures still, as if they were always pausing for thought. It's a fascinating conversation about the human form in the age of technology.