Artwork Information

Gassed while serving in the French army at Verdun in September 1916, Fernand Léger was hospitalised at Villepinte, near Paris, until the end of 1917. His wartime experience had a profound impact on his art. Fully convinced that a ‘machine gun or the breech of a 75’ were more accessible to ‘the people’ than ‘four apples on a table or a Saint-Cloud landscape’, the artist upon returning to Paris in 1918 produced paintings like 'Les pistons [Pistons]' that depict rods, caps, pistons, discs and other machine-inspired imagery. With its carefully arranged broad planes of primary and secondary colour against a black and white geometric background,'Les pistons [Pistons]' evokes the whirr, hiss and churn of torquing propellers and pumping cylinders. The painting could be viewed as a figure painting, a still life or a cityscape, complicating traditional notions of genre and creating an ambiguity which further contributes to the work’s proudly declared modernity.

− 2024