The Three Musicians 1944

Fernand Léger made The Three Musicians with oil on canvas and it feels like he’s making a statement with color, boldly setting the musicians against a flat yellow and red ground. The figures are built up of simple, clean forms, with none of the blending or soft brushwork you might expect. The paint is applied in a way that emphasizes flatness, with each color contained within hard, dark outlines. Look at the accordion player’s hands: the details are almost diagrammatic, creating an interesting tension between representation and abstraction. Notice the patterned decoration on the accordion. It's almost cartoonish, but it works, right? Léger's art shares a spirit of invention with other artists of his time like Picasso, but there's something uniquely optimistic about his paintings. They remind me that art is a playground for ideas. It's a way of experimenting with how we see and relate to the world, even when the rules seem pretty strange.