“I organize the opposition between colors, lines, and curves. I set curves against straight lines, patches of color against plastic forms, pure colors against subtly nuanced shades of gray.”
—Fernand Léger
Highlighting his iconic style with an emphasis on primary colors and rounded forms, Fernand Léger’s Jeune fille à la branche from 1951 is a masterful example of the artist’s bold iconography. A unique gouache used as inspiration for a later series of lithographs published by Galerie Louise Leiris, Paris, the present work emphasizes Léger’s idiosyncratic method of creating a sense of three-dimensionality within a graphic, flat space. Depicting a woman with dark hair beside thick-stemmed flowers which take up as much space as the portrait, Léger uses collage-like layering and bold, primary colors to create depth. Merging a Cubist visual vocabulary with a more stylized representation of the figure, Jeune fille à la branche emphasizes the artist’s preoccupation late in his career with using rounded, tubular forms, which would become a hallmark of the artist’s legacy.
