1919

The City (Fragment, Third State)

French, 1881 - 1955

This is one of a dozen or so paintings featuring eye-catching disks that Fernand Léger made in 1918 and 1919. These painted disks, modeled after railroad signals and other semaphores, seem to pulsate with color within bright configurations of flat and rounded surfaces that evoke bits and pieces of a city vista. For Léger, these visual symbols exemplified associations and qualities that he sought for his own art. He was interested, first, in connecting modern art to modern life—and these signaling apparatuses were quintessentially modern since they belonged to the mechanical systems of transportation. Second, Léger took those semaphores and signals—devices that speak in a language of contrasting color and geometrical shape—as inspiration for a bold new type of abstraction in painting.