The Divers

Fernand Legers The Divers from 1942 is a gouache and watercolor preparatory study for a painting from the artists American period that transforms the act of diving into a dynamic composition of fragmented bodies and geometric splashes. Leger spent the war years in the United States, where the scale of American industry and the energy of American leisure culture profoundly affected his work. The Divers series, which he began during this period, represents an attempt to capture the experience of bodies in free fall through water, a subject that perfectly suited his interest in movement, fragmentation, and the interpenetration of figures and space. In this gouache, the divers are broken into cylindrical and curved components that float in a field of blue and white, their bodies simultaneously recognizable as human and abstracted into the tubular forms that Leger had been developing since his early Cubist paintings. The graphite squaring visible on the paper indicates that this study was intended to be transferred to a larger support, either canvas or mural, and the squaring process reveals Legers working method of building up from preparatory studies through increasingly larger versions to the final painting. The watercolor and gouache medium allows for the rapid, transparent washes that suggest the liquidity of water, while the black ink outlines maintain the graphic clarity that distinguishes Legers work from the more atmospheric approaches of his contemporaries.

Legers American period was a turning point in 20th-century art, when European modernist traditions encountered the scale and energy of American industry and popular culture. The Divers series influenced the development of postwar abstraction in America by demonstrating that Cubist fragmentation could be combined with popular subject matter and decorative color to create a new kind of figurative abstraction.

A vibrant preparatory gouache study by Leger from his American period, fragmenting the bodies of divers into tubular forms that float through a field of blue and white, combining Cubist structure with popular leisure culture in Legers characteristically dynamic synthesis.