Nature morte à la lampe (Still Life with Lamp)

Fernand Léger, who trained to be an architect before studying painting, cemented ties to avant-garde art movements from 1907 onwards. His encounter with Cubist artists from the gallery of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, of which he was part, marked the start of his experimental explorations with a language which would bring him in closer proximity to abstraction. From 1913 to 1914, he worked on his Contraste de formes (Contrast of Forms) series, comprising works made through geometric volumes, chiefly cylinders and cones, whereby pure colours and white give an impression, by turns, of volume and metallic shine. Nature morte à la lampe (Still Life with Lamp) is an illustrative example of this approach, in which elements of still-life — lamp, fruit bowl, cups and glasses — transform into metal, mechanical and ultra-modern objects which anticipate, by a number of years, those developed by Bauhaus in the 1920s. After being conscripted at the start of the First World War and subsequently wounded in combat, his work, in the aftermath of the conflict, would move into another phase as he gradually returned to figuration.



Raúl Martínez Arranz