"Chaos and Classicism" at the Guggenheim

Woman Holding a Vase, Fernand Leger, 1927
Leger was among the major French artists who stayed true to his Cubist instincts even after the war. But in a canvas like this one he finds a way to combine a Cubist fragmentation of forms with something like classical stability. Though the vase she holds and the hand that grips it may be disjointed, the woman's skirt looks like a stable fluted column, and overall she resembles a caryatid — the sturdy pillars sculpted in the form of women used as supports in some Greek temples.

• Picasso at the Metropolitan Museum of Art