Les saltimbanques

Fernand Léger's "Les saltimbanques" (1940) is a charcoal drawing with stumping, erasing, scraping, and wetting on pink wove paper, altered to a tan tone, squared with charcoal for transfer. The title refers to traveling performers—acrobats, clowns, and street entertainers—a subject with a rich history in French art from Daumier to Picasso. Léger's treatment shows the saltimbanques as figures of the modern world, their bodies rendered in the simplified geometric style that characterized all his work. The variety of techniques employed in this drawing—stumping, erasing, scraping, wetting—creates a rich surface of diverse textures and tones. The pink paper, altered to a tan tone, provides a warm ground. The squaring for transfer indicates that this drawing was a preparatory study for a larger painting. Created in 1940, the year of France's fall to Nazi Germany, this drawing of traveling performers may have carried additional resonance as a meditation on displacement and the fragility of human life in a time of war.

Léger's saltimbanques drawings connect his machine-age aesthetic to the long tradition of representing traveling performers in French art, from the 17th-century followers of the commedia dell'arte to Picasso's Rose Period.

This richly worked charcoal drawing of traveling performers shows Léger's technical mastery and his ability to invest a traditional subject with the energy and formal vocabulary of the modern age.