Painted in 1928, Nature morte is a powerful re-envisaging of the still-life subject that exemplifies Léger’s radical and innovative approach to painting in the modern age. Depicting a range of near-abstract forms and highly stylised fragments of everyday objects, it brings together seemingly disparate pictorial elements: sharp lines are combined with soft, organic shapes, while an earthy, subdued palette is enlivened by the vivid red and white of the chequer[or chess]board. The large blocks of solid pigment reflect Léger’s belief in the key role of pure colour, while the chiaroscuro effect in the head is stylised to the point of becoming a reference to its own artificiality, rather than attempting to imitate nature. This very modern approach to the traditional genre of still-life painting is typical of Léger’s work of the late 1920s (fig. 1) and reveals an interesting development from the pure abstraction of the pre-First World War compositions.

The elegant and clearly delineated elements of Nature morte point to the impact of the Purism of Amédée Ozenfant and Le Corbusier (fig. 2) on Léger’s painting during this time. A search for classical beauty and balance that characterised the so-called rappel à l’ordre influenced many avant-garde artists working in Europe in the 1920s. After a decade disrupted by the First World War, during which time Léger found inspiration in the mechanisation of society, he was ready for a change. As he remarked: ‘I had broken the human body, so I set about putting it together again and rediscovering the human face [...] I wanted a rest, a breathing space. After the dynamism of the mechanical period, I felt a need for the staticity of figures’ (quoted in Fernand Léger (exhibition catalogue), The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1998, p. 188). Yet, there was nothing conventional about his return to figures, or indeed more traditional genres of painting.

As in several other paintings from this time (fig. 1), one of the key motifs in Nature morte is the profiled bust or head. This is placed alongside other, more ambiguous elements, creating complex and perplexing spatial relationships within the two-dimensional plane of the canvas. There is a definite, though tentative, connection with Surrealism. Although Léger never formally engaged with the Surrealists, as one of the prevailing movements in 1920s Paris it was nonetheless of interest to him. The framing of the profiled head and the stylised chiaroscuro effect that leaves the features in shadow reflect the influence of Giorgio de Chirico's metaphysical paintings (fig. 3), such spatial ambiguities and fragmentation of the human body were ideas also embraced by Léger’s contemporaries associated with the Surrealist movement. Equally, the rather enigmatic combination of objects here are reminiscent of a Surrealist or Dada approach. Indeed, contemporary photographs of Léger’s studio (fig. 4) suggest that he may have been assembling and arranging objects – either as the basis for specific compositions or as a kind of thought-aide for his work in paint.

Any surreal elements to the composition are strictly secondary to Léger’s interest in formal qualities, although the role of the object remained key. In 1924 the artist had begun experimenting with film, making the now-celebrated Ballet mécanique, and this re-awakened his awareness of the object: ‘Léger’s constant fascination with the object was reinforced by his work with film. Experimenting with the close-up technique enabled him to take an object out of context, enlarging and isolating it’ (Charlotte Praestegaard Schwartz, in Fernand Léger. Man in the New Age (exhibition catalogue), Arken Museum of Modern Art, Ishøj, Denmark, 2005, p. 25). The effect of this can be seen in the present work, where the objects fill the canvas with all the intensity of a close-up shot.

It was these formal concerns that remained key for Léger, underpinned by an ongoing consideration of what painting meant in the modern world, and how it could remain relevant in the cultural context of mass-produced and mechanical objects and images. Writing about the artist’s paintings from the mid-1920s, Christopher Green commented: ‘They are the product of a pictorial idea of the figure or object whose brutal “plastic” simplicity is personal, but which is the product of an approach to the realities of modern life indelibly tinged with the idealism of L’Esprit Nouveau, an approach which remains stubbornly “realist” but whose highly selective vision of the world picks out the most useful, the most geometrically “pure”, the most precisely finished of its manufactures, and subjects even the nude or the figurative fragment to the mass-production yet “classical” values thus extracted’ (C. Green, Léger and the Avant-Garde, New Haven & London, 1976, p. 310). This encapsulates Léger’s achievements of the 1920s; although influenced by prevailing artistic movements, he nonetheless evolved a style entirely his own, and one exemplified in the present work.