In the 1920s, Léger became extremely interested in the cinema and its visual vocabulary. While he continued designing sets and cost.mes s for Rolf de Maré’s Ballets Suédois in the early 1920s, he also began to work on films, collaborating with the writer Blaise Cendrars and, in 1923-24, designing the set for the laboratory scene in L’Inhumaine directed by the avant-garde filmmaker and theorist Marcel L’Herbier. Shortly thereafter, Léger conceived, wrote and co-directed his first full-scale film, Ballet Mécanique, in collaboration with director Dudley Murphy, composer George Antheil and fellow artist and cinematic consultant Man Ray (see fig. 1). The film was neither abstract nor narrative, but rather a rhythmic progression of images including close-ups of quotidian consumer objects, a flash of a woman’s smile, and isolated frames from advertisements—snippets from life in the modern age.

As they are parallel to the techniques already employed in Léger’s Cubist work, these cinematic devices translated seamlessly into his painting. By incorporating the ideas of montage, close-up, and fragmentation into his subsequent output, the objects in Léger’s still lifes appear in seemingly unpredictable configurations, brought together with no contextualizing narrative nor conventional spatial context. Rather, the artist’s goals were chiefly plastic; he sought to produce work in which form and subject both create and exploit the contrasts produced by their juxtaposition. This effect was best realized through the placement of the composition’s various elements within an invented space, one in which their essence could be truly appreciated. As the artist recalled in 1954, “I placed objects in space so that I could take them as a certainty. I felt I could not place an object on a table without diminishing its value… I selected an object, chucked the table away. I put the object in space, minus perspective. Minus anything to hold it there. I then had to liberate color to an even greater extent” (quoted in Dora Vallier, “La Vie fait l’oeuvre de Fernand Léger,” Cahiers d’Art, vol. 2, 1954, pp. 152-53).

The bright and bold compositions Léger produced in this period are typical of an artist who saw the twentieth-century condition as a “state of contrasts” and who articulated modernity through juxtapositions of shape, color and line. The dislocated nature of modern life is rendered through the representation of abstracted figurative elements against geometric backgrounds which disrupt the space and perspective of the composition (see fig. 2). In the present work, geometric planes are placed side-by-side with curving, abstract forms. Rational shapes are intersected by meandering lines, and ombre-shaded waves overlap flat aplats of color. As the influential art historian and collects or Douglas Cooper has noted, “scattered objects [set] up a rhythm between themselves, while the space in which they moved was created by pushing the objects into the foreground and setting up a play of colors in the background. The objects are related to each other by means of carefully controlled chromatic values, by similar or opposing rhythms and by the use of lines of direction which weave in and out through the whole composition. Léger places his objects at just the right distance from each other: they are held there by virtue of the laws of harmony and rhythm” (Douglas Cooper, Fernand Léger et le nouvel espace, London, 1949, pp. XIV-XV).

As he was interested in exploring the language of painting in its fullest and purest form, in the late 1920s, Léger pared his vocabulary down to the ultimate elements of color and shape. In Jeux (Nature morte au cartes), however, there is a thematic unity present that is often absent from the artist’s still lifes from the 1920s (see fig. 3). Though it remains decidedly abstract, the background still evokes the surface of a card table, though the lamp in the lower center is expressly not placed upon it. Four cards occupy the left register, the only part of the composition in which Léger has employed a semblance of realistic shadow. Yet, in order to further divorce the objects from their real-world environment, Léger also plays with scale within their arrangement, the lamp diminutive in comparison to the cards beside it.

The primary colors pervading the present work—yellow and red—were also of particular significance to the artist. According to Léger, these are the colors that express the reality of the medium of painting, and it is perhaps intentional that the text from which the painting takes its title can be found in the yellow pigment. In keeping with his efforts to introduce the cinematic into his work, while the text of the word “JEUX” is like that which one might see in static twentieth-century advertisements or on building façades, the fragmentation of the letters themselves emphasizes the sense of dislocation which comes with the immediate suspension of rapid movement. Indeed, as an example of both the formal and conceptual preoccupations he held at the t.mes , Jeux (Nature morte au cartes) is a key work in the evolution and development of Léger’s style.