Paysage d’hiver, painted in 1950, is exemplary of Fernand Léger’s idiosyncratic pursuit of pictorial harmony. Leger has balanced the muted pale-green hills in the forefront of the work, with the bold choice of a yellow sky in the background. In a similar vein, the sharp black lines are softened by the swaying curves of grass. The reconciling of elements is also present in the subject matter, where natural motifs are combined with abstracted industrial symbols, bringing together these two traditionally opposed worlds.

In that regard, Paysage d’hiver ties into a change in Léger’s thinking following the Second World War, where the destruction brought on by tanks, bombers and other human made weapons, invited pause on so-called ‘wonders’ of technological advances. Indeed, Léger began to revise his earlier exaltations on technology and, instead, came to recognise that the further humanity distanced itself from nature, the greater human impact had on the world. In Paysage d’hiver, the scaffolding, erupting from the foliage and carrying on past the end of the canvas, takes centre stage in the composition, alongside other mechanistic, abstract shapes that illustrate the effects of mankind. The structural drama of the work illustrates the intensity felt as the artist explored his altering relationship with technology.

Ina Conzen-Meiars argues that Leger depicts nature and technology as codependent, and that ‘in contrast to the ever-changing world of technology, nature stands for the enduring, and only in union with it can man likewise hope to survive.’ (Ina Conzen-Meiars, cited in Exh. Cat., Denmark, Arken Museum of Modern Art, Fernand Leger (1881-1955), Man in the New Age, 2005, p.44). In some works, this interconnectivity is brought to the fore, such as in Etude pour 'Les Constructeurs': l'équipe au repos (fig. 1), where Leger, deploying more literal iconography, has firmly situated a construction site in the landscape, depicting plants and scaffold growing skywards from the same soil. While more subtle in its exposition, Paysage d’hiver, articulates a similar visual integration. The abstracted scaffold is firmly rooted in the hills, held sturdy by the land; the abstracted shapes - the orange strip for example - are formed by the curve of the landscape before them; as well as the persistence of the nature, even in the bleak winter period – testifying to its resilience. All these individual aspects of the composition allude to an essential relationship between nature and technology. The brilliance of Léger’s artistic craft is his ability to evoke his concerns symbolically in a visual dialect, where the technological world is at once battling against, and building itself upon, the natural world. Paysage d’hiver perfectly encapsulates this debate, and indeed, how the artist himself conceptualised this ‘new’ landscape of the post-war world.