Men in the City

Two men take shape among bars, coloured panels and fragments of railings. One has a pale, rounded head; the other turns a dark blue profile towards him. Their bodies seem assembled from the same materials as the city around them. In Fernand Léger’s Men in the City, the first difficulty is deciding where a person ends and the surrounding construction begins. Human presence remains unmistakable, even as the eye keeps finding other ways to read each shape.

Painted in 1919, Les Hommes dans la ville is an oil on canvas measuring 145.7 by 113.5 centimetres. It belongs to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, where it is recorded under inventory number 76.2553 PG 21. ^[1] Its upright format brings the figures close together within a tightly divided field. There is no broad avenue leading into the distance. The city presses against the men and reaches between them.

Finding the men

Start with the figure on the left. A blue-grey neck supports a light oval head, with curved patches of shade making its surface appear hollowed and rounded. The face has very little descriptive information. Nevertheless, the relationship of head, neck and shoulders is enough to establish a human body. A few curves make recognition possible.

Below the head, a pale triangular chest is flanked by sharply different shapes. A narrow blue plane descends on one side; a broad black curve swells on the other. At the waist, a light horizontal form bends across the body, ending near a small upright oval. Its greenish underside gives it a surprising sense of weight. This can be followed as an arm, but its cylindrical construction also encourages us to see an independent solid fitted across the picture.

The man on the right announces himself through a quite different head. A white circular eye punctures a dark blue profile, whose projecting nose and stepped mouth stand out against the lighter area to its left. The silhouette is so economical that the face almost becomes a sign. Where the pale head has soft transitions between light and shade, this one relies on the hard opposition between a dark outline and its surroundings.

That difference prevents the figures from becoming interchangeable units. They share a mechanical vocabulary, yet Léger gives them distinct visual characters. One is rounded and modelled; the other reads as a cut-out profile. Looking from one to the other, we move between volume and silhouette, between a face that seems to turn in space and one whose presence is fixed by its edge.

The right-hand body continues this alternation. A dark upright cylinder beneath the head appears to swell through shading, while a sloping black form farther right catches a long pale highlight. Smaller rounded pieces and striped ovals interrupt the connection between these larger masses. We can recognise the suggestion of limbs and joints without reconstructing every anatomical link. The incomplete connections keep the figures open to the city’s pattern.

A city built from interruptions

The setting is legible in fragments. At the left edge, small arches and upright bars resemble a balcony railing. Near the right-hand figure, a rectangular lattice repeats its little dark openings. Slanting bands pass behind the bodies, while long uprights divide the canvas into narrow zones. These details suggest a built environment, though they never join into a continuous street view.

The black vertical towards the left is especially forceful. It travels through several changes of background colour and gives the scattered elements a common measure. Around it, small horizontal divisions and rounded details become more noticeable. Its strength depends partly on that difference of scale: an almost uninterrupted bar stands beside a sequence of tiny marks.

Elsewhere, dark blue planes rise behind the heads and shoulders. Their sharp edges suggest the abrupt exposure of one surface beside another as we look through a crowded urban space. Yet their colour also joins them to the right-hand face and to the narrow blue shape on the left figure’s torso. The painting makes connections across the supposed boundary between people and buildings. A colour belonging to a head can reappear as part of the surrounding structure.

Red supplies a different rhythm. Near the top, a vertical red oval hangs between uprights. A red square appears against a pale curved form, and farther down, larger red shapes occupy a light rectangular field. These lower shapes have the boldness of pieces of lettering. They invite an association with signs or posters, but do not require us to recover a complete message. Their visual impact arrives before any possible reading.

The cream, ochre and grey passages are equally active. They create the intervals through which the darker and brighter forms become distinct. A pale area can suggest an opening behind a figure, then flatten into a panel beside a red shape. Space remains shallow and changeable. The viewer repeatedly experiences a glimpse of depth followed by the recognition of a flat painted arrangement.

Mechanical bodies and human presence

The Peggy Guggenheim Collection places the painting in Léger’s mechanical period. Its commentary connects his return to figurative imagery after 1917 with the technological world and postwar advertising, and describes the city figures as impersonal and mechanised like their environment. It also emphasises the equal pictorial importance of masses, colours and forms. ^[1]

That equality is visible in the way a piece of railing can hold attention as firmly as an eye. A conventional portrait usually directs us towards expression, using the setting to support our understanding of the sitter. Here the people participate in a larger arrangement. The dark blue face matters both as a human profile and as a strong patch of colour balancing other dark areas.

This formal treatment leaves their state of mind uncertain. Their simplified faces provide little basis for assigning an emotion or inventing a relationship between them. The figures may appear impassive, but the rest of the canvas is full of incident. Léger sets the reduced information of the faces against the abundance of their surroundings. Much of the painting’s tension comes from that unequal distribution of detail.

Rachel Boate’s account for the Metropolitan Museum of Art connects Léger’s renewed engagement with recognisable subjects to his wartime experience. She stresses his respect for fellow soldiers and workers and his ambition to reach a broad public while retaining a modern artistic language. ^[10] This provides a useful context for the anonymous men. Their resemblance to engineered parts need not settle the question of how Léger valued human beings. The picture asks us to encounter them through forms that also belong to contemporary material life.

The speed of looking

Despite its firm outlines, Men in the City is difficult to take in at a glance. Attention moves from the white eye to the red square, from the rounded head to the striped ovals, from a broad black curve to a tiny grid. Each discovery makes another part of the canvas more conspicuous. The sense of movement comes from these changes of attention rather than from a blurred body or an illustrated sequence of steps.

The Centre Pompidou’s teaching dossier describes Léger’s modern city through vivid colours, advertisements, letters and a multiplication of sensory signals. It relates this interest to the earlier Contrasts of Forms, in which lines, volumes and colours gain force through their opposition. ^[11] The Venice painting retains that principle while giving us recognisable inhabitants. A face and a rectangle can be different kinds of subject yet perform comparable work within the composition.

The dossier also reproduces a recollection by Blaise Cendrars, published in 1954, of meeting Léger around Place Clichy. Cendrars remembered scaffolding and posters, and suggested that such sights helped generate the painter’s mechanical period. This is a later recollection, encountered through the museum’s dossier; it gives a vivid account of a shared urban environment without identifying the Venice canvas as a view of that square. ^[11]

In the painting itself, the repeated bars and panels offer the experience of a city encountered in pieces. We need not imagine the painter standing at one fixed viewpoint from which everything could be mapped. The composition holds different visual incidents together. Its order belongs to the relationships Léger has made between them.

Beside The City of 1919

Léger explored the subject on a very different scale in The City, also painted in 1919 and now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. That museum describes its enormous composition as mural-like, with stencilled letters, a balcony railing and fragments of metal girder contributing to a field of clashing shapes and vivid colour. Its breadth and flatness envelop the viewer like a backdrop or cinema screen. ^[4]

Men in the City concentrates the encounter. Its tall format gives the two figures a strong vertical presence, while the bars and fragments occupy the narrow intervals around them. The lower bodies extend towards the edge, leaving little space in which to imagine an unencumbered pavement. Human scale becomes an immediate point of entry into the surrounding visual density.

The distinction also changes the role of the city’s signs. In the Venice canvas, a red square or a few letter-like curves can catch the eye beside a face. Their proximity gives people and signs a comparable urgency. Looking oscillates between recognising people and registering the graphic environment that competes for attention.

An enduring problem of figures and surroundings

The combination of people and mechanical forms continued to change in Léger’s work. Boate describes the more stable, frontal figure of Woman with a Cat in 1921 and the enduring metallic qualities of its modelling. Her account follows his interest in ordinary people into the later decades, including dockworkers, divers and bicyclists. ^[10] The Venice men belong to an early, especially compressed stage of that continuing investigation.

Their distinctive quality emerges most clearly when we return to the heads. The pale oval and the blue profile remain readable amid the surrounding divisions, but neither commands the whole picture. The white eye is as crisp as the tiny openings in a grid; the rounded neck carries the same kind of light as a dark cylinder below. Recognition survives through these correspondences.

Men in the City makes urban experience tangible through the effort of looking. We find a person, follow an arm, lose the connection at a coloured panel and begin again at a railing or an eye. The city becomes something the figures share with the viewer: a field of sharp signals and shifting depths in which people remain visible, held together by the painter’s arrangement of colour and form.