Léger, Fernand

By Annette Becker

1914-1918 Online

Internal Encyclopedia of the First World War

This text is licensed under Creative Commmons Licence

(Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Germany-CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)

Table of Contents

- 1 War and Art

- 2 Cubism

- Notes

- Selected Bibliography

- Citation

War and Art

The French painter, Fernand Léger (1881-1955) explored the depths of war, death and avant-garde creation. He often said how greatly his personal experience with industrial modernity as a sapper, then as a stretcher-bearer at the front influenced his art: “the breech of a 75 millimetre in the sunlight taught me more than all the museums in the world.”[1]

Cubism

He defended cubism – and was among its most radical experimenters – with macabre irony:

To all the blockheads wondering whether I am or will still be a cubist when I return, you can tell them more than ever. There is nothing more cubist than a war like this one, which can more or less cleanly section a man into several pieces and blast him to the four cardinal corners.[2]

After being poisoned by gas at Verdun, he attempted to hole up behind the lines as a camoufleur, but despite his efforts he was still drawn to the hospital. He never depicted in his artwork the torn apart bodies that struck him so strongly; he recounted the strange horror – between impossible, "camouflaged" visions and omnipresent sounds:

The war was grey and camouflaged. All light, colour and even tone were banned on pain of death. A blind existence in which anything the eye could register and perceive had to hide or disappear. Nobody saw the war hidden, concealed, crouched on all fours, earth coloured; the useless eye could not see anything. Everyone ‘heard’ the war. It was an enormous symphony that no musician or composer has yet been able to equal: Four years without colour.[3]

Annette Becker, Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense

Section Editor : Emmanuelle Cronier

Translator: Jocelyne Serveau

Notes

1. ↑ Fernand Léger à Louis Poughon, Une correspondance de guerre, Les cahiers du musée national d’art moderne, 1990.

2. ↑ Ibid.

3. ↑ Fernand Léger cited in: Léger, Fernand: Rétrospective, Saint-Paul-de-Vence 1988.

Citation

Becker, Annette: Léger, Fernand , in: 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War, ed. by Ute Daniel, Peter Gatrell, Oliver Janz, Heather Jones, Jennifer Keene, Alan Kramer, and Bill Nasson, issued by Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin 2014-10-08. DOI: 10.15463/ie1418.10707. Translated by: Serveau, Jocelyne

License

This text is licensed under Creative Commmons Licence (Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Germany-CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

War and Art

Cubism

Selected Bibliography

Citation

Content