Two Women (Two Sisters) 1935

Fernand Léger made this drawing, Two Women, sometime in the first half of the twentieth century, using ink on paper. The drawing has a great kind of directness, even though it's very pared down. There's a really lovely hatching over the whole surface, defining the figures and the space around them, which also gives it a lovely kind of handmade feel. The textures remind me of charcoal, but there’s a firmness that comes from the ink. Look at how the hatching almost ignores the outline of the forms, like on the legs of the left-hand figure, where the lines wrap around the form, creating a kind of volume but also disrupting our sense of it being a body. It's so simple, yet so complicated. Léger was a contemporary of Picasso, and you can see both of them grappling with how to represent form. But where Picasso was very sculptural and dramatic, Léger has this flatness, this feeling of everything being on the same plane. Like with Matisse, it shows that drawing can be painting, and painting can be drawing, and somehow, they are both the same.