Étude pour ‘La Grande parade’ 1948

Fernand Léger made this study for ‘La Grande Parade’ with gouache, ink, and graphite, and you can really feel the joy in its creation. The color palette is upbeat and playful, lots of yellow, purple, and green, like a primary school party or an invitation to the circus! What really grabs me is the materiality of the piece. The gouache is laid down in these confident, almost slapdash gestures, giving the whole thing a sense of immediacy, like Léger was just having fun. The way the ink outlines define the figures but also bleed into the gouache, it's like the forms are still in process, not quite settled. It's especially noticeable around the clown's ruff on the right. It makes me think about how Léger saw the world as a kind of construction site, always in motion. He was clearly looking at Cezanne and the early cubists, but I also see echoes of Matisse’s paper cut-outs in that color palette and confident line. But Léger’s got his own thing, a kind of mechanical whimsy that’s totally unique. It's a reminder that art is a conversation, not a monologue.