Fernand Léger (1881-1955)

Painted in 1946, Composition is a bright and bustling picture, filled with colour and rhythm, that dates from the year of Fernand Léger's return to his native France, following his time in the United States during the Second World War. Coming back to his homeland, he was filled with optimism, and this has clearly translated itself into his painting: this abstract agglomeration of forms bursts with a sense of raw life. The strange forms that make up this composition appear only half rooted in the visual universe; while retaining some of the geometric discipline of Léger's earlier works, the picture is also infused with some of the lyricism of the Surrealism adopted by many of the artist's friends. Of his work from this period, Leger said 'I dispersed my objects in space and kept them all together while at the same time making them radiate out from the surface of the picture. A tricky interplay of harmonies and rhythms made up of background and surface colors, guidelines, distances and oppositions' (Léger, quoted in W. Schmalenbach, Fernand Léger, New York, 1976, p. 32).

Composition, with its exuberant explosion of planes, spheres, balls, flowers and fantastical imagery, is a work pulsating with rhythm and energy, whose dynamism displays an ongoing process of experimentation and discovery by an artist who had always been preoccupied with movement.