Mario Naves reviews the exhibition Léger, Modern Art and the Metropolis at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, on view through January 5, 2014.

Naves writes: "World War One didn’t alter Léger’s take on the machine. If anything, it emboldened a sensibility already entranced by the machine’s regularity, precision, and power. Admittedly, a revived humanism did enter the work, if not always in imagery—Léger’s figures are always robots or symbols, never flesh-and-blood entities—then in spirit and reach. Compare Leger’s art with that of post-war contemporaries like Otto Dix, Max Ernst, or Max Beckmann, and Léger comes off as positively sunny. Not every artist who has experienced suffering has to suffer in the studio. Léger remained something of a utopian until the end of his days. You can’t help but think: More power to him. The exhibition’s most literal moment of angst is found in The City. Just below center is a hulking figure rendered in a smudgy array of grays—engulfed in shadow, presumably— stalking a more individuated silhouette. This vignette is of a piece with a panorama that is, if not typified by threat, then overwhelmed by impersonal phenomena: maze-like passageways, towering shards of architecture, cluttered purviews and fractured words, signs and figure"