The artist thus orchestrates the painting from left to right in such a way as to endow each element [...] with a key part in the narrative that unfolds on the canvas. 

Le Compas (Compasses) or Composition au serpent (Composition with Snake) belongs to the purist phase of Fernand Léger’s painting, to the “Doric period” that followed, during the 1920s, his “dynamic period”.¹ Having abandoned Cubism, Léger had drawn closer to the approach advocated by Le Corbusier and Amédée Ozenfant in the magazine L’Esprit Nouveau, the last issue of which appeared a few years before this painting. Contact with these circles had led him to greater simplicity of form and breadth of volume, above all in the genre of still life, which inspired him to develop a series of compositional variations on elements arranged on a surface. In his hands, this was indeed transformed into a side-by-side depiction of figural elements laid out parallel to the plane of the canvas against a background of abstract and orthogonal geometric shapes. The latter organise the rhythm imparted to the reading of the work while creating a contrast between some elements moulded with a bold chiaroscuro that enhances their three-dimensionality and others of a flat nature, like a wall against which the objects float with no direct relation. The artist thus orchestrates the painting from left to right in such a way as to endow each element (the compasses, the snake, two ropes, the three aces, the flowers and the two tubes of leads for drawing) with a key part in the narrative that unfolds on the canvas. 

The choice of objects also belongs to the purist period in question. It was in 1925 and 1926 in particular that Léger painted a number of still lifes featuring technical drawing instruments, addressing in more general terms the self-referential theme of graphic means as the first stage of the pictorial work. This appears for the first time in Nature morte au compas (Still Life with Compasses, 1925),² which shows an open pair of compasses - from such a close viewpoint that the top section is not included in the painting - ready to draw a circle. The compasses are instead closed and as though placed in a long, narrow, rectangular case in Roses et compas (Roses and Compasses).³ The pair of compasses reappears in 1926 in Nature morte (le compas) (Still Life [Compasses]),⁴ published by Waldemar George in the Nouvelle Revue Français and L’Amour de l’Art.⁵ The renowned critic and advocate of a “return to order” in French painting described Léger on this occasion as making a fundamental contribution to purification of the artist’s profession through a return to static composition, giving importance to objects without disavowing the “cylindrical” morphology of their forms. 

At the same time, the painter was fully engaged in the debate on mural decoration and his works of the period can be seen as models for monumental wall paintings. The pair of compasses that give the work its title is an instrument for use on a building site rather than a drawing board, serving to draw circular lines on large surfaces by means of a taut cord. At the same time, the composition is set in an interior, albeit with the deliberate introduction of spatial ambiguities, a possible reminder of the overlapping of images derived from the technique of collage, which make the location of the objects uncertain, more symbolic in character than real. 

Le Compas belonged to the American industrialist and famous collector George David Thompson. In 1961 it was presented at the Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna in Turin on the occasion of the exhibition dedicated to his collection. After a few passages in the European and American markets, the painting, with the strength of this important provenance, arrived in the Cerruti Collection. An archive photograph, presumably dating from the second half of the 1990s, shows it hanging in the entrance of the villa. The work is already mentioned in the handwritten inventory of the collection dated 30 June 1993. 

Luca Pietro Nicoletti

¹ Tériade 1928.

² Baquier 1993, pp. 30-31, no. 409.

³ Ibid., pp. 418-419, nos. 417-418.

⁴ Ibid., pp. 116-117, no. 459.

⁵ George 1926.