ABSTRACT
Soon after Leger arrived in New York in October 1935 to promote his exhibition at the Museum of Modem Art, he was pictured in the New York Herald Tribune above the headline, 'Leger Advises Painters Not To Use Beautiful Women as Their Models'.1 In the accompanying report, Leger tried to explain the 'problem' of beautiful women by reference to a critical distinction between constructive art, in which the painting itself (as a material, concrete or 'plastic' form) constituted the object of beauty, and what he termed 'decadent art' in which the depicted subject matter carried the message of beauty. As he stated in the report, 'A painter should not try to reproduce a beautiful thing, but should make the painting itself a beautiful thing'. Implicit in this notion is his familiar analogy between creative and manufacturing processes, between artistic and industrial products. As Leger would have it, both artist and artisan put their sensibilities at the service of a job; both attempted to turn in a part that was nothing less than clean, polished and burnished and the product of their respective labours shared an aesthetic quality that overturned all received notions of beauty.2 Les Disques (1918, Musee d'Art Modeme de la Ville de Paris), which is positioned behind Leger in the Herald Tribune photograph, and the thematic series relating to Element Mecanique (1924, Musee National d'Art Modeme, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris) illustrate this ideal of 'production' and a new order of beauty through their particular combinations of formal and technical signifiers: strong geometric shapes, accentuated lines, bold commercial colours and technological motifs imaginatively and skilfully put together with consummate professionalism. The human figure, honed to precision, was often incorporated into Leger's scheme of representation but, as indicated in the Herald Tribune interview, the use of a woman as model created an obstacle for Leger's vision of modem production because of the centrality of that subject matter to an outmoded, but still persistent, order of pictorial beauty. The depicted figure of a woman created a strong tension in
the composition because it invoked a set of values, interests and meanings traditionally invested in artistic representations of woman.3 Locked into a system of conventional ideas about beauty, this motif inevitably interfered with - indeed, competed against - the machine aesthete's concept of beauty, making it especially difficult to redraw the lines.
