Fernand Léger’s most famous works from the 1940s and early 1950s explored the theme of construction workers. This series culminated in the monumental oil painting “Les Constructeurs” (1951), which is now part of the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts collection in Moscow.
The inspiration for this series came from a real-life encounter, as Léger himself described: “Seeing men high up on the steel beams of a construction site, swaying against the sky, they seemed almost insignificant. I wanted to capture that feeling – the contrast between humans and their creations, the workers dwarfed by the metal structures, the hardness of the iron, the bolts and rivets.” (quote by Fernand Léger in Werner Schmalenbach’s book “Fernand Léger,” New York, 1976, p. 158).