gallery The 13 works gathered here fill a single, smallish room that many museumgoers will walk through too quickly. Besides holding works from a crucial, concentrated period in Léger’s development, the room also serves as a passageway between two other rooms. That makes it the perfect space for a show that reveals an artist who stood, during the two-year period when these works were made, on many thresholds at once: between abstraction and representation, between old and new subject matter, between centuries of tradition and a bold push for modern ways of seeing.
 What a square: Studies for "The Staircase" (above) and "Still Life" by Fernand Leger, efforts from a few formative years on display at the UVA Art Museum. |
As part of a group of Cubist painters in pre-WWI Paris, Léger was involved in an experiment, larger than any one individual, whereby the norms of painting began to fracture into pure elements of color, line and shape. One result of this approach is that the illusion of depth begins to flatten. The eye skips along the surface of a 1913 study for “The Staircase” (in which a figure becomes a tumble of tapered cylinders and crescents, showing with furious energy all the spaces a forearm did or could occupy) rather than being drawn to a distant vanishing point (think of the far reaches of landscape behind the “Mona Lisa”).
It’s well worth stopping in this little room. Along with helpful wall text by curator Matthew Affron, a patient viewer will appreciate both Léger’s ambition and how thoroughly his radical moves have, in the intervening century, become part of the way we see. In 1914’s “Village in the Forest,” houses and trees are simple forms—thick black outlines filled roughly with color. These familiar objects exist in a thicket of lines and strokes of color, as though a traditional painting of a village had been jumbled. A red roof in the center is so vivid, and so vividly speaks to other red roofs and walls, that it seems to prove what Léger proposed—that in a world made strange by modernization, a more assertive visual language was necessary to make us see more deeply.