Page 30 - Studio International - September October 1975

Le Balustre is not an abstract painting;
it was the sequel to Léger's 1924 still-
lifes, descriptive modelling, as solidly
smooth as the modelling of a
photographic re-toucher, in conflict with
flat, stark planes. But Léger's other
contribution to the 1925 Exposition was
an abstract painting: the so-called
Peinture murale hung in Robert Mallet-
Stevens's entrance hall to a French

Robert Mallet-Stevens
Entrance Hall to a French Embassy
with Peinture Murale by Leger, 1925

Embassy. And inextricably involved with
Léger's development of a style attuned
to architecture during the mid-twenties le état graphique, projet fresque 1922-23
is the larger question of how a painter Musées Royaux de Belgique, Belgium
whose entire avant-garde career had been
committed to the cubist game with the
object could turn to abstraction.
Mondrian's championship of a self-
sufficient geometric abstract style had
left him very much alone in the Paris of
the early twenties, uncompromisingly
outside the dominant post-cubist trends.
Within the circle of the galerie de l'Effort
Moderne, in which Léger moved, only
Auguste Herbin was tempted by the
purely geometric, and he, it is now
known, only within the limits of an
emphatically decorative intention.2
Abstract art was either ignored or
tolerated as no more than an
embellishment of architecture, and it is
therefore not surprising that when Léger
first turned to the problem of abstract
art and architecture he should have
approached it superficially.
In the Musées Royaux de Belgique
there is a drawing inscribed on the back:
`le état graphique, projet fresque 1922,
exposé Salon Indép 22'. It refers to an
architectural arrangement of two shaped
panels by the 'Effort Moderne' sculptor
Joseph Csaky which were painted by
Léger and shown at the 1923 Salon des
Indépendants in February of that year
(not 1922); and this Belgian drawing,
another closely related to it, plus a colour
illustration which appeared in the review
L'Architecture Vivante (Autumn Winter
1924) are the only surviving indications,
besides written accounts, of what it
looked like. Yet there is enough evidence
for the general point to be made that here
Léger treated the wall as a surface to be
transformed by colour and line: by the Design for a fresco for the outside of the hall of a house 1922
energy of obliques, by the jostling disc (As illus. in L'Architecture Vivante, Autumn/Winter 1924)
and, as Maurice Hiver put it in

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