In 1913, Léger declared that “pictorial contrasts” were the essential element of modern art. The same year, he completed Contrast of Forms. The painting, as suggested by its title, is packed with clashing shapes that jostle across its patterned surface. Arranged in a loose pile, these geometric cones, cubes, and cylinders feature brightly colored stripes and patches that underscore their structural differences.
Like earlier Cubist works by Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, fellow Paris-based artists, Contrast of Forms is organized around planes and solids depicted from multiple perspectives. Yet the painting is defiantly abstract, with none of the real-world subject matter that anchored Braque and Picasso’s Cubism. For Léger, it was the relationship between lines, forms, and colors that mattered most to modern art.
2026
Gallery label from Inventing Abstraction, 1910–1925 , December 23, 2012–April 15, 2013.
Toward the end of 1912, Léger made among the most defiantly abstract works yet seen. Over the next two years he worked intensely in this experimental idiom, producing the fifty or so canvases, and twice as many works on paper, that constitute his Contrastes de formes (Contrasts of forms) series. An inventory of repeated forms—geometric cones, cubes, cylinders—jostle and pile across the surfaces of these works. Here, Léger rejects illusion to focus on the mechanics of representation, drawing attention to them with roughly blocked forms, exposed supports, unmodulated color straight from the tube applied in painterly patches, and highlights detached from any light source. Chiaroscuro, the traditional technique of light and shadow used to create the illusion of three-dimensionality within the two-dimensional reality of the picture plane, becomes a language of absolute contrasts: strident black and white or colored striations clash with one another across the works.
Inventing Abstraction, 1910–1925, December 23, 2012–April 15, 2013.
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Galerie Kahnweiler, Paris. [1913 - 1914. Possibly sequestered in 1914, until 1923]
[4th auction sale of Kahnweiler collection, Hotel Drouot, Paris, May 7-8, 1923]
Prytec Gallery
Sidney Janis Gallery, New York. By 1952
Mr. and Mrs. John L. Senior, Jr. Purchased from Janis, November 13, 1952 - 1957
Philip L. Goodwin (1885-1958), New York. Purchased from John L. Senior, Jr., April 5, 1957 - 1958
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Bequeathed by Philip L. Goodwin, May 1958
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