In World War I, a young French stretcher-bearer got to thinking about life and art. People who wage war, he reasoned, are messy inside and out, but the precise, blankly implacable machines they kill with have a brutal beauty. Ever since then, Fernand Léger (rhymes with beige hay) has been painting flat, bright-colored pictures which look as smoothly efficient, and as difficult to comprehend, as the instrument panel of a B29.
Priced at about $2.50 per square inch of canvas (from $350 to $6,000), Léger's solidly meshed combinations of keys, wheels, metallic leaves...
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