The chair (membership to the lamp, the lamp still life) 1955

Fernand Léger made this lithograph of a chair and a lamp sometime in the 1950s. It is an arrangement of bold black lines, punctuated by fields of flat red and yellow – like a deconstructed Mondrian! I wonder what Léger was thinking when he made it? Was he trying to boil down the world to its most basic shapes and forms? These everyday objects, like the lamp and the chair, feel so monumental and solid here. The lamp looks like a friendly robot and the chair like a throne. The flat planes of color seem to press forward, while the black outlines hold everything together. The white of the page peeks through, giving the whole image a sense of lightness and air. It makes me think of other artists like Stuart Davis and Sonia Delaunay, who were also playing with abstraction and everyday life. It is like they were all in conversation about how to see the modern world, inspiring each other to find new ways of representing it on canvas.