La Noce 1910 - 1911

Fernand Léger made this painting, La Noce, with oil on canvas, and you can imagine him building up the composition, block by block. He’s working with a muted palette, mostly blacks, greys, and whites, with just a blush of pink peeking through. Look at the geometry, the way he's simplified figures and forms into cylinders and cones. I bet Léger was thinking about how to capture the energy of a crowd, a sense of movement. It feels like he is influenced by Cubism, but he’s pushing it in his own direction. I can feel him experimenting with how flat shapes can create depth. It's like he’s building a machine out of people! And that one little stroke, like a thin, dark slash, creates the feeling of an eye, of someone looking back at you. Painters learn from each other, and Léger was definitely in conversation with artists like Picasso and Braque, but he’s doing his own thing. Painting is like a language, and we’re all just trying to find our own voice within it.