Recent Acquisitions: Fernand Léger, Le disque dans la vie, 1920

Posted on April 26, 2016 by Kristin Swan

Hood Quarterly, winter 2003

A drawing by Fernand Léger (French, 1881–1955) entitled Le disque dans la vie (The Disk in the City, 1920) is just one of a number of superb modern works on paper recently given to the Hood Museum of Art by Elizabeth E. Craig.

Within this impressive gift, which includes drawings by such major artists as Paul Klee, Amedeo Modigliani, and Philip Evergood, Léger’s composition reflects the near-ubiquitous appearance of machine imagery in his art from about 1918 to the early 1920s. For Léger, the mechanical element in particular was “not a fixed position, an attitude, but a means of succeeding in conveying a feeling of strength and power . . .”

This double-sided drawing, the fortieth (and earliest) object by this artist to enter the museum’s permanent collection, is on display in Lathrop Gallery as part of the current exhibition The Decade of Modernism: Selected Paintings, Sculptures, and Works on Paper, 1910–1920.