Le grand déjeuner 1921

Fernand Léger made this painting, Le grand déjeuner, with oil on canvas sometime in the early 1920s. Look at how Léger puts down these flat, bold colors and hard edges like he’s building something, like he’s got a construction site in his head. The painting's surface is smooth, almost machine-like, but not quite. You can sense the artist's hand in the way the colors are layered. It’s like he’s working with solid blocks of color instead of blending them. See the way the red of the table just pops against the cool blues and grays? And those figures, almost like robots, they're assembled from cylinders and spheres. Take a look at the bottom right corner, at the way the black lines are painted onto the canvas. The artist seems to have been pushing the paint around in a way that feels deliberate. It reminds me a bit of Stuart Davis, especially how he combines abstraction with everyday objects. But Léger goes further, pushing everything to the brink of pure form. What does it mean to see bodies as architecture? It's something to chew on.