Maquette pour un foulard 1952

Fernand Léger made this design for a scarf using gouache and ink. It’s so interesting to imagine Léger at work here, arranging the forms and colors, probably tweaking it a lot. I like to imagine him thinking about how flat shapes and colors could create a dynamic composition. You’ve got these blocks of color—red, yellow, blue—and then these black lines defining figures. A profile, a full face, a hand, a bird. That hand reaching up is so interesting to me – is it stopping something? Is it a mirror image? A positive or a negative? What might Léger have been thinking when he made this? Maybe about industry, architecture and the machine age? I think about how this piece relates to other artists, too. Léger’s in dialogue with Picasso and Braque, for sure. He takes the language of cubism, but makes it his own. It’s all one big conversation, isn’t it?