Composition aux Deux Personnages 1920

This drawing, Composition aux Deux Personnages, was made by Fernand Léger. The bold shapes and contrasts are really striking, aren’t they? You can see how Léger is building up the forms with these hatched, shaded marks. I can almost feel the artist carefully layering the graphite, figuring out how these shapes can come together to make something new. It's like he's wrestling with the image, pushing and pulling it into existence! You know, looking at the subject matter of this piece, and thinking about how it relates to the history of geometric painting, Léger must have been really into the industrial world and the machine aesthetic. It's like he’s saying, hey, we can find beauty and inspiration in the everyday, in the things we build and create. It’s this attitude that makes his work so fresh and forward-thinking. It is like he is encouraging us to keep looking, keep questioning, and keep making!