Colorful cubist lithograph by renowned artist Fernand Léger. The work showcases his iconic "tubism" version of cubism, including rounded, mechanical shapes and figures. This lithograph was featured in the Derrière le Miroir, a French art magazine created in 1946 and published until 1982. Signed in print and in pencil in front lower right corner. Currently hung in a black and gold wooden frame.

Fernand Léger was born in 1881, the same year both Picasso and Braque were born, in Normandy; his father was a substantial cattle grazer. Fernand was trained as an architectural draughtsman and later worked as a professional retoucher of photographs. He was an abstract painter before the War, in which he had a brilliant record. He had visited the United States twice. In France, he lived in a villa next to some railroad tracks in a Paris suburb, and a farm in Normandy where he raised pigs and made cider. It is often said that Léger was the artist of the machine age, but he was not entirely a man of his time. He knew poverty as a child, was gassed in World War I, had to flee before the invading Nazis in World War II. But there is little of death and destruction in his work. Other men have painted with more passion, few with more exuberance. He devoted himself to depicting common, real objects that he described as "everyday poetic images" and that gave him a sense of returning to order. Cityscapes and machine parts became subjects in his work as did nude females, mothers and children, and animals grazing in landscapes. These paintings had very bold colors. Not everyone appreciated his work. Alfred Barr, Director of the Museum of Modern Art, said that Léger was a "noisy artist chasing fire engines, the business about him being a champion of the machine, and the clever mot about 'Tubism' ". Léger returned to France at the end of 1945 after spending the war years traveling and lecturing in the United States. There had been three previous visits to America in the 1930s, all entrepreneurial adventures of only modest success. He had resumed his practice of making public appearances to explain his art to a sometimes curious, sometimes bewildered public. In addition, he enjoyed many celebrity encounters, like a holiday with Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald, an evening at the theatre with James Joyce and friendships with Ezra Pound and Henry Miller. Léger died in 1955.

H 27.5 in. x W 31 in. x D 1 in.

H 14.5 in. x W 20 in.