Landscape 1913

Here's a landscape by Fernand Léger. Looking at these planes of greens, browns, and blues, I try to imagine Léger at the easel, trying to make sense of the world through blocks of color. How does the painting come into being? Not through rendering what's literally there, but maybe emerging through feeling and trial. Look at the red lines that shoot up from the bottom of the canvas—are those telephone poles? Or something else? I can feel the artist wrestling with form and space. Léger was so interested in machines, so maybe this is a way to find the mechanical in nature, or vice versa. I see him looking at Cézanne, but going further into abstraction. All painters are in conversation with each other, picking up where others left off, trying to make something new out of something old. It's an ongoing, never-ending process.