Nature Morte en bleu 1949

Fernand Léger’s ‘Nature Morte en bleu’ is alive with strong black lines which fiercely hold the color in place like stained glass. I imagine him carefully laying down the boundaries before filling each space with a solid block of paint. Was he thinking about advertising, or maybe the way signs work? There’s something graphic in the way he reduces everything to its simplest form. The blue is so blue, the red so red, it feels like he’s trying to make the perfect version of those colors. Look at the way he outlines everything in black – it gives the painting this incredible flatness, but also a kind of depth, like you could step into the painting and rearrange the objects. Léger is talking to Cézanne and the Cubists here, but he’s also setting the stage for Pop Art and the graphic sensibilities that would explode later in the century. It’s all one big conversation, isn’t it?