Three Women

Three nude women recline in a tidy geometric interior, their bodies rendered as smooth, polished, tubular forms, like figures turned on a lathe, set among equally machined furnishings. Fernand Leger gives the age-old subject of the reclining nude a cool, mechanical modernity, the soft female body reimagined as gleaming industrial volumes. Now in the Museum of Modern Art, Three Women (also called Le Grand Dejeuner) is his monumental fusion of the classical and the machine - the odalisque tradition rebuilt for the age of the factory, sensuality cooled into precise, impersonal, beautifully balanced form.