Three characters 1920

Fernand Léger's 'Three Characters’ is a Cubist painting rendered with oil on canvas. I wonder what it was like for Léger to conjure up these figures and the geometric setting they occupy. How do you begin something like this? Is it a feeling, an idea, or just a desire to engage with the materiality of paint? The shapes are flat, hard-edged, and seemingly impersonal. They are arranged in a composition of primary colors—blues, reds, yellows—and juxtaposed with blacks, whites, and grays. Léger’s figures are stripped down to basic, machine-like forms. I think he saw something profound in the modern world of machinery and industry, and he wanted to bring that aesthetic into painting. It makes me think about the legacy of Cubism and how artists like Léger were trying to find new ways of representing the world, breaking it down and reassembling it. There is also a conversation happening between painting and sculpture in the interplay of volumes. Even today, artists are still grappling with those ideas, always pushing, always trying to find new languages.