Curator, Ann Temkin: Fernand Léger was among the first artists to show abstract pictures in Paris.
Curator, Leah Dickerman: In 1912, Léger dedicated himself to making a cycle of drawings and paintings that would become known as the Contrast of Forms. He's distilling from landscape motifs and images of figures, but the buildings become basic cubes and the figures become arching lines or cylinders or tubes and the drawing itself becomes very schematic.
In traditional academic drawing, three tones are used: black as a shadow, white as a highlight, and the paper becomes a middle tone. What Léger does is take this three-tone system and liberates it from representation and illusionism. You'll see that the paintings are composed like drawings. The lines are drawn, the support in between is shown, there's a lack of finish, and then the colors are added. Not colors that represent natural things in the world, but almost as if they're coming freshly-squeezed from the tubes of paint themselves.
What Léger seems to be doing is analyzing the system out of which images are made. In fact, he didn't use the word “abstraction.” But instead, he used the term “pictorial realism.”