Les pistons [The Pistons]

Gassed while serving in the French army at Verdun in September 1916, Fernand Léger was hospitalised at Villepinte, near Paris, until the end of 1917. His wartime experience had a profound impact on his art. Fully convinced that a ‘machine gun or the breech of a 75’ were more accessible to ‘the people’ than ‘four apples on a table or a Saint-Cloud landscape’, the artist upon returning to Paris in 1918 produced paintings like 'Les pistons [Pistons]' that depict rods, caps, pistons, discs and other machine-inspired imagery. With its carefully arranged broad planes of primary and secondary colour against a black and white geometric background,'Les pistons [Pistons]' evokes the whirr, hiss and churn of torquing propellers and pumping cylinders. The painting could be viewed as a figure painting, a still life or a cityscape, complicating traditional notions of genre and creating an ambiguity which further contributes to the work’s proudly declared modernity.

− 2024

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