Racine

In the 1930s, the modern "tubist" painter Fernand Léger began to translate elements of nature, including tree leaves, branches and roots, in his distinctive formal vocabulary of geometric shapes and primary colors. His abstract 1937 Racine is one large-scale example of this organic genre. This phase marked a shift away from his "mechanical style"—that is, the geometric figures, industrial materials and cityscapes—that had dominated his work throughout the 1920s, towards a softer and rounder aesthetic. Despite this significant thematic change, Léger maintained that the modern artist's role was not to perfectly mimic nature, in the trompe l'oeil tradition of Old Master painters, but rather to totally reimagine it, producing something modern and new. As he asserted in his 1935 lecture entitled "The New Realism", which he delivered at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and subsequently published in the American magazine Art Front in December 1935, "The natural phenomenon or the beautiful object cannot be copied; the artist must make something as beautiful as nature" (quoted in Fernand Léger, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1998, p. 224).
Indeed, for Léger, the subject matter of Racine was secondary to its painterly style. The organisms, patterns, textures and colors observed in nature might serve as a source of inspiration, but those motifs were ultimately subject to the will of the artist's eye and hand. He explained this notion further in his 1935 lecture: "The human body is of no weightier plastic interest than a tree, a plant, a piece of rock, or a pile of rope. It is enough to compose a picture with these objects, being careful to choose those that may best create a composition....If I isolate a tree in a landscape, if I approach that tree, I see that its bark has an interesting design and a plastic form; that its branches have dynamic violence which ought to be observed; that its leaves are decorative. Locked up in 'subject matter' these elements are not 'set in value.' It is here that the 'new realism' finds itself" (ibid., p. 224).
The 1930s were a transformative decade for Léger's career. He traveled throughout the United States, encountering vast American landscapes, flora and fauna for the first time. He was also the recipient of retrospective exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and The Art Institute of Chicago, which introduced his work to a broader American audience, and earned major commissions by the French government and Parisian Opéra. These professional successes emboldened the artist to attempt simpler and more abstract compositions, such as Racine, which depicts deconstructed parts of a tree, rendered in bright yellow, blue and red, floating against a flat white background.