The first truly global military conflict, World War I, scarred and reshaped entire generations of men and women. For many, it seemed that art in its usual sense could no longer exist after such destruction. For a promising young Cubist called Fernand Léger, combat was a traumatic and formative experience. After barely surviving a mustard gas attack, Fernand Léger radically changed his painting style and artistic objectives.
Who Was Fernand Léger?
One of the legendary figures of the Cubist movement, Fernand Léger, was born in 1881 in northeastern France into a family of cattle dealers. His father died when Léger was only two years old, and, oddly, this tragic event contributed to Léger’s future artistic career. According to the artist, if his father had been alive, he would not have had the chance to explore his creative inclinations and would most likely have become another farmer.
Léger started his artistic career in the mid-1900s, first attempting to paint in the Impressionist style. Soon, however, he realized that the movement had outlived its purpose and went on to experiment with more avant-garde forms of art. He soon became famous as a talented Cubist with his own unique approach to composition. In the years before the Great War began, he started to experiment with abstract art, learning to appreciate color and form without the necessary connection to physical reality.
World War I Combat: Unseen Destruction
World War I was a shock for many, even though premonitions of a great conflict had lingered in the air for years. The only thing worse than the number of countries and people involved in combat was the astonishing technological progress of the recent decades that showed its darker side. Machine guns, artillery, and fighter planes created a war landscape entirely different from anything seen before. Apart from machinery, humans invented another way to kill one another, deadly and silent. World War I was the first instance of toxic gasses (mostly mustard gas) used as a weapon of mass destruction.
Yellow fumes of mustard gas formed painful blisters on exposed skin, burnt one’s lungs from the inside, and badly injured eyes. Even those who managed to evade a painful death from burns and collapsing lungs were often left blind or physically impaired. Mustard gas was heavier than air, so there was no escape from it in trenches. Inventing a proper gas mask took inexcusably much time, and for a while, soldiers had to use pieces of cloth dampened with anything liquid and non-toxic to lessen the impact of the poisonous fumes.
Trench warfare itself presented new opportunities for fighting and new ways to get gravely injured. Soon after the war began, surgeons noted the peculiar change in the overall character of wounds. Prior to World War I, combat wounds mostly affected limbs or torsos. However, as the combat moved to the trenches, the most frequent injuries occurred to heads and faces, drastically raising the number of deaths and severe impairments.
Generation of Artists Reshaped by the War
Many lives were lost on the battlefield, including those of famous and promising young creatives. The militaristic Italian Futurists who welcomed the war as “the only hygiene of the world” soon changed their minds. The most talented of them, a young sculptor and painter called Umberto Boccioni, was trampled to death by his own horse during a military exercise. German Expressionist Franz Marc was killed in the battle of Verdun days before the letter of his discharge from service reached the front.
Other artists survived the war but remained forever traumatized by it, like Otto Dix, who developed an entirely new and radical way of the uncompromising depiction of reality called New Objectivity. Even though governments rarely consulted the drafted artists on their service preferences, some managed to apply their creative skills to the military cause. Paul Klee, for instance, painted aircraft camouflage, experimenting with different styles of avant-garde painting to achieve the best effect.
Fernand Léger’s Years of Service
Soon after the war erupted, Fernand Léger was drafted as a sapper, later turning into a stretcher-bearer. He tried to ask his superiors to appoint him as a draftsman or chef, but this was not the time to consider individual preferences. He spent almost three years on the frontlines and had little to no room for creative expression during his service. In his minutes of spare time, he made sketches on military maps and ammunition boxes. Some of his drawings he sent to his first wife Jeanne-Augustine. Most of these images were gruesome and disturbing, showing the aftermath of bombings, mutilated corpses, and artillery. Léger realized how much had changed with this war: in a letter to his friend, he wrote that the wartime fear turned from visual (provoked by the enemies’ faces) to purely acoustic, with sounds of bombings and artillery inspiring horror.
In 1917, Léger was hospitalized after a mustard gas attack. While recovering, he painted one of the two paintings of his wartime period, which indicated a growing radical change in his art and worldview. The source material for Soldiers Playing Cards came from his years in the trenches: the artist copied figures’ poses from the sketches he sent to his wife. In the years that followed, Léger insisted that although wartime reality was dark, gray, and gruesome, it nonetheless demonstrated to him the absolute value of any physical object and human connection. From then on, he focused his art on reality, although reworked in a radically new manner.
Léger’s Experience Reflected in His Later Works
After the war, Léger became preoccupied with the idea of bringing the world back to order. In the war-ravaged and chaotic reality, he tried to establish control through creative expression. Léger and many other artists seemingly took a step back from the radical avant-garde and returned to the principles of the revered Old Masters.
The most radical turn happened to Léger’s subject matter. From a devoted abstractionist, he turned into a promoter and advocate of figurative art. He stated that he never experienced reality with such intensity before the war and planned to revive it in the following years. Still, war was horrible, painful, destructive, and lacked color. The way this war was planned or orchestrated, as Léger wrote, was “as unimaginative and linear as a geometry problem; pure abstraction, purer than Cubism itself.” Thus, to restore the balance of the world, he felt the necessity to come back to figurative art. In his post-war career, Léger explored different facets of the reality market through human presence and human activity: circus acrobats, construction site workers, and women holding flowers. It was life in its purest form, the celebration of creation over destruction.
Fernand Léger’s Solidarity With the Working Class
Apart from his return to figuration, Léger brought back from the war his sense of solidarity with people of different backgrounds, with whom he had barely contacted before. The majority of his trench neighbors were working-class men with little to no education and years of hard labor behind them. Even the language those people spoke and how they behaved seemed different to Léger. In a way, the working class was much more touched by modernity in its most immediate sense than the privileged groups. Machinery, mechanization, and the modern speed of life were part of their everyday existence. Later, Léger stated that their jargon, crude jokes, and inventive word constructions were forms of contemporary poetry. In a similar manner, he wanted to create an artistic language coded in the same manner as the language of people he became familiar with—raw, functional, and unusually expressive.
Léger insisted that he never painted his machines from reality—he invented them, just like most painters would paint an imaginary landscape or artificially constructed scene. For him, incorporating machinery into art was just as obvious and normal as it was for Manet and the Impressionists to paint urban scenes. The landscape around humans was changing, and art had to adapt to it. Léger made several attempts to bring his ideas to the working class, like the Renault factory workers whom he visited in the 1950s. However, his bold ideas and simplified imagery were still too strange for ordinary people from non-artistic backgrounds.
After hanging several of his paintings in the Renault canteen, he was upset to learn that the workers either ignored or mocked his images. Still, later, one of the workers approached him, saying that his colleagues could finally appreciate the works only after they were taken down from the walls. In his view, only after losing sight of the paintings, the audience could see how different the colors made them feel.
