Les femmes à la toilette 1920

Fernand Léger made 'Les femmes à la toilette' with oil paint, sometime in the 20s. The painting is a dance of flat shapes and stark contrasts, typical of Léger's approach to Cubism. Look at the surface: it's smooth, almost mechanical, as if it were made by a machine rather than a human hand. The colours are bold and primary, with reds, blues, and greens clashing against the blacks and whites. There's a real sense of movement in the composition, as if the shapes are all jostling for attention. Take that black cylinder, for example. It's so solid and grounded, yet it's surrounded by these floating, amorphous forms. It creates this tension between the industrial and the organic, the rigid and the fluid. Léger's work reminds me a bit of Stuart Davis, with his love of geometric forms and urban landscapes. But where Davis is jazzy and syncopated, Léger is more monumental, more concerned with the underlying structure of things. Art's like that, an echo chamber of ideas bouncing back and forth across time.