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Léger, Fernand
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
- Becker, Annette: Arts, in: Winter, Jay (ed.): The Cambridge history of the First World War. Civil society, vol. 3, New York 2014 Cambridge University Press.
- Becker, Annette: Voir la Grande Guerre. Un autre récit, 1914-2014, Paris, 2014: Armand Colin.
- Fleckner, Uwe: Der Kubismus an der Front. Militärische und künstlerische De(konstrunktion) im Werk Fernand Légers, in: Schneede, Uwe M. / Bundeskunsthalle Bonn (eds.): 1914. Die Avantgarden im Kampf, Cologne 2013 Snoeck, pp. 236-245.