His service in the French armed forces fostered Fernand Léger’s conviction that living through World War I would attune people to the strength and power of the mechanical. In the war’s aftermath, he often painted ordinary individuals as anonymous, robot-like creatures and placed them in settings suggesting stripped-down, modern architecture.

Man with a Cane was the first of three versions of the same subject Léger painted in the same year. The titular figure appears at the center of the composition with a half-circle head, corrugated neck, and shoulders in the form of sectioned cylinders. He grips a ball-headed cane with his right hand. Behind him is a figure dressed in the white uniform, bonnet, and red-colored armband of a hospital nurse. The two figures’ right hands and forearms seem to overlap. This type of fusion of body parts—and intriguing form of pictorial abstraction—was typical for Léger in the early 1920s.