The Staircase 1913

Fernand Léger must have made ‘The Staircase’ with a brush full of blocky, primary colours, like building blocks for the eye! I imagine him shifting these forms around on the canvas, searching for some kind of architectural rhythm. Look how Léger’s laid down these stripes of red, white and blue. The black outline grounds these cone-like forms and gives the painting its graphic punch, like a poster. I can almost feel the artist thinking about how all these shapes lock together, making a kind of machine-like composition – as if the body could be translated into something mechanical. Léger’s got you looking at the world like he does, with the everyday turned into something monumental and strange. Painters like Léger are always in conversation with each other, pushing and pulling at what painting can do. And these paintings continue to move us, challenging the way we think about what's real and what's imagined, now and forever.