Composition au panier

Léger began to paint realistic subjects again in the 1940s and 1950s, after a period of working with abstract imagery. Rather than a return, he viewed this shift as a continuation, now with a new vocabulary, of the pursuit of pure painting. He wrote in 1950, “New subjects envisioned with the contribution of the freedoms that previous experimentation has offered must emerge and establish themselves” (quoted in Fernand Léger, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1998, p. 247). For Léger, the goals of his paintings were the same whether the subject derived from the material world or was completely abstract.
In Composition au panier, Léger depicts a basket on a stool filled with fruit, a subject from the time-honored tradition of the French nature morte. In a formal approach typical of the artist’s post-war pictures, the composition is built from black contours defining the objects, which, like a vessel, contain local color. Surrounding the still life are radiating circles of color. Here we see Léger’s interest in juxtaposing figurative and abstract elements in order to undermine the spatial conventions of the still life genre. In discussing still life paintings, the artist 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 is made up of background and surface colors, guidelines, distances and oppositions” (quoted in W. Schmalenbach, Fernand Léger, New York, 1976, p. 132).