Discover the Cubist World of Fernand Léger

Anastasia Kirpalov | The Collector | 29th March 2025

A primer of sorts on Léger, who gets less attention than he should. He started thinking about cubism after a Cezanne exhibition in 1907, but an even bigger visual epiphany was seeing the sun glinting off gun barrels during WW1. Viewing the machine age with great optimism, he combined a “tubular” style of figuration with the use of primary colours to communicate how different the new age would be from the natural world. Léger’s emphatic use of primary colours is now regarded as a precursor of Pop art.