Fernand Léger

Awaiting passage from the wharfs of Marseilles to America in 1940, Léger  was struck by the sight of young men diving into the waters of the Mediterranean.  This impression, he wrote, was the initial stimulus for the Divers.  The Divers was the first of a series of monumental and important compositions which define the artist’s mature period.  In the Divers, elements of the body, arms, heads, torsos and legs became independent from one another and fuse into compact bundles which seem to fall headlong into bottomless depths. The same weightlessness of motion in water, led to a series of major and entirely novel compositions in which the figures are transformed into a rotating, radiating force, floating in space and time.  The La Danse series followed directly on from this and the radiating forms are reduced to disembodied, linear symbols.  Colour, applied in independent bands, emancipates itself from form and now has a life of its own, serving to accentuate the underlying kinetic forces of the dance.  The outline figures and the colour planes thus set up a dual rhythm which creates multiple layers of depth and sets up a dynamic interaction within the pictorial space.