On the other hand, it is possible to read the entire work as an outdoor view. The viewer is placed both inside and outside. In the Bridge, the lack of an easily legible table-top and still life, and of a window or picture-frame for the landscape exacerbates the ambiguity by adding a degree of uncertainty. In the still life, the indoor/outdoor ambiguities are handled straightforwardly-the table-top still life is clearly indoors and the landscape with its frame is clearly a picture hung on the wall. As in The Bridge, the inverted half-disk in these paintings contains a planar arrangement which contrasts sharply with its surroundings, as if it is a view through to abstract passages in another painting, and significantly in one of them a framed landscape hangs on the wall behind the fruit bowl, offering the illusion of a view outdoors. The association between the idea of the interior and the lower area of The Bridge, comprising the chequerboard and the colour planes below it, is strengthened by the relation between this work and two still lifes painted in 1923, which use a comparable cut-out disk device.

The flat coloured architecture of the 'backdrop' also prefigures Léger's move into mural painting in 1924-1925 it echoes especially the architectural arrangement of shaped, brilliantly coloured panels which he exhibited as a first foray into this field with the sculptor Josef Csaky at the Salon des Indépendants of 1923, his preface to the sets for L'Inhumaine. Here, however, it slices across a broad swathe of folded countryside, behind which is a backdrop of urban architectural forms rendered in brilliant red, green, black and white, like a detail of one of the enormous grain elevator-like edifices on the horizon of the Large Tugboat.

The long horizontal wedge of the chequerboard reappears, sliding left to right across the composition as in the watercolour and its model, the painting in Grenoble. It is as if a vertical slice had been taken out of a synthesis of that enormous painting and its precursors, including the Thyssen-Bornemisza Tugboat watercolour. The work relates loosely to those canvases of 1923 which deal with urban and suburban buildings alone, but it relates most obviously to the revival of the Tugboat theme of 1920-1921, which culminated in the Large Tugboat of 1923 (Biot, Musée National Fernand Léger). The Bridge is both an outdoor scene and, because of the placing of the 'foreground' area of abstract shapes below and of the two emerald green posts above, can be read as a view from inside out, a view perhaps behind the pilot's of an imaginary polychromatic Corbusian building. Its flat planar architecture is closely comparable with that of Léger's laboratory set.įor L'Herbier, Léger designed an interior which could be animated by lights and movement. The Bridge is one of the paintings produced in 1923 which take as their subject either architecture alone or the confrontation of architecture and nature as a confrontation of flat colour disks and planes and bulging forms tonally modelled.

Constructed of painted wooden flats, this set was a realisation in three dimensions of the pictorial architecture he had developed as a painter in 1918-1921 it is an adaptation of the vocabulary of disks and colour planes used for the urban architecture and ship superstructures in the Tugboat paintings of 1920-1921, itself adapted from the disk compositions of 1918-1920. Towards the end of 1923 Léger designed the set for a laboratory of the future to be used in making Marcel L'Herbier's film L'Inhumaine.

Picktorial 3 vs bridge