Between 1923 and 1926 Léger completed a series of what became know as his Purist paintings. ‘Composition à l’échiquier’ is an outstanding example of Léger’s involvement in Purism which began as an extension of his mechanical period, itself a reaction to the war, in which his work was dominated by industrial objects. In Purism the figures and objects are rendered to their essential form

Despite his friendship with Ozenfant and Le Corbusier, who first developed the concept of Purism in 1918 as a reaction against the Cubists and their fragmentation of the object, Léger kept his distance from their doctrinal ways, feeling that someone “had to go to the extreme”, exemplified in ‘Composition à l’échiquier’.

For Léger, his intention was to achieve absolute harmony between the reality of the object and the purity of style. By reducing an object to its fundamental shape and elements, it can be re-assessed and appreciated for its form. In ‘Composition à l’échiquier’ a chess board is hung in space alongside a wheel and vase, in a manner that Léger described as “I dispersed my objects in space and kept them all together while at the same time making them radiate out from the surface of the picture.”

‘Composition à l’échiquier’ is a study for an oil painting of the same year titled ‘Nature morte (Le movement à billes)’, which is now in the Kunstmuseum, Basel. Both works carry the same fundamental elements and composition. The checked board is found in two other seminal paintings from this period ‘Le Mannequin au damier’ and ‘Nature morte à l’encrier’.

‘Composition à l’échiquier’ has an illustrious history, having first been in the collection of Douglas Cooper, the British art historian, critic, collector and early champion of Cubism. ‘Composition à l’échiquier’ hung in the library of his Monaco apartment.