THE CITY
FERNAND LÉGER, 1919
Okay. Quick Léger fact. He spent three years of the war digging trenches in the Argonne. Shells going over his head the whole time. And the thing he wrote about wasn't the fear. It was the breech of a 75 millimeter cannon with the sun on it. "The magic of light on the white metal." His words. The deadliest object in France, and he's standing there thinking, that is gorgeous. Then he gets gassed, spends a year in a hospital, and comes home. And this is what he paints about it. The City. 1919. No trenches anywhere. Billboards. Scaffolding. A staircase. A giant letter B with no word attached. Full volume. Now find the people. Two of them, down by the stairs, dead center. Flat. Dark. No faces. Then look at the posters. The blue guy in the billboard on the right has more color than the actual humans. Maybe that's a complaint. Doesn't feel like one. Feels like a man who walked out of the war still in love with the machine that almost killed him. He just stopped pretending people stood outside it. There's no horizon in here, by the way. No place to stand, no view. There's even a big purple pole planted right in the middle, blocking the best part. Cities do that. You don't look at this city. It hits you. Which is the honest version. Nobody sees a city. You're just in one, and it's loud, and somewhere a sign is shouting half a word at you. He thought all that was worth loving. Stand here a minute. Hard not to.