Lot Essay
Léger made only three paintings in 1917: the present painting; Nature morte (Bauquier, no. 103); and La partie de cartes (Bauquier, no. 102), his major war picture, now in the Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller in Otterlo. He made these paintings following his service in the First World War on the front near Verdun. The war affected Léger deeply, perhaps more than his previous contacts with avant-garde painters; although Léger's aesthetic and practice had been deeply influenced by the modernist paintings of the Cubists, principally Picasso and Braque, in the early years of the decade, the war dominated his sensibility after 1916.
Léger volunteered for service in the war, serving first in the artillery and then in the more dangerous role of stretcher-bearer. He wrote of this experience:
I came out of a milieu of intellectuals...and found myself with peasants, laborers, miners and bargemen... I wanted my work as a painter to be as tough as their slang, to have the same direct precision, to be as healthy... It was in the trenches that I really seized the reality of objects. I thought back on my first abstract studies, and a quite different idea concerning the means, the use and the application of abstract art took root in my mind. (Quoted in P. de Francia, Fernand Léger, London, 1983, p. 31)
Léger made drawings of the trenches and of the paraphernalia of war in which he retained the tubular forms of his celebrated 1913 series, the contasts de formes, but he depicted more clearly the subjects in his drawings, common soldiers with whom he was proud to be numbered. He painted little during his service, except studies on the wooden tops of ammunition boxes, but after being forced by an injury to leave the trenches, he made three paintings which encompassed what he had learned in combat, Le soldat à la pipe, 1916 (Bauquier, no. 100; Kunstsammlung Nordrhein Westfalen, Dusseldorf), La partie de cartes, and the present work, Le blessé.
With their shattered compositions, the tiny drawings that Léger made during the war "gave Léger...the key to a large scale mode of composition that could contain the intensity of his experience of things" (C. Green, "Out of War: Léger's Painting, 1914-1920," in ed. D. Kosinski, exh. cat., Fernand Leger, 1911-1924, The Rhythm of Modern Life, Kunstmuseum, Wolfsburg, 1994, p. 53). The subjects in the paintings--soldiers smoking and at leisure--are reworkings of classic subjects used previously by Cézanne and Picasso. The way that Léger treats them, however, is new and dramatic, particularly the form of the hand, which is depicted as a group of tubular clumps holding a cigarette. Whereas Le soldat uses the subdued palette of Cubism and an undefined background, both La partie de cartes and especially Le blessé move towards the more flattened, equalized backgrounds of the paintings of the 1920s. There is a second version of the present painting in the Milwaukee Art Museum, Le blessé II, painted in 1920 (Bauquier, no. 241). It is less direct than the present work, farther from Léger's wartime experience and closer to the more decorative pictures of the 1920s.
Léger volunteered for service in the war, serving first in the artillery and then in the more dangerous role of stretcher-bearer. He wrote of this experience:
I came out of a milieu of intellectuals...and found myself with peasants, laborers, miners and bargemen... I wanted my work as a painter to be as tough as their slang, to have the same direct precision, to be as healthy... It was in the trenches that I really seized the reality of objects. I thought back on my first abstract studies, and a quite different idea concerning the means, the use and the application of abstract art took root in my mind. (Quoted in P. de Francia, Fernand Léger, London, 1983, p. 31)
Léger made drawings of the trenches and of the paraphernalia of war in which he retained the tubular forms of his celebrated 1913 series, the contasts de formes, but he depicted more clearly the subjects in his drawings, common soldiers with whom he was proud to be numbered. He painted little during his service, except studies on the wooden tops of ammunition boxes, but after being forced by an injury to leave the trenches, he made three paintings which encompassed what he had learned in combat, Le soldat à la pipe, 1916 (Bauquier, no. 100; Kunstsammlung Nordrhein Westfalen, Dusseldorf), La partie de cartes, and the present work, Le blessé.
With their shattered compositions, the tiny drawings that Léger made during the war "gave Léger...the key to a large scale mode of composition that could contain the intensity of his experience of things" (C. Green, "Out of War: Léger's Painting, 1914-1920," in ed. D. Kosinski, exh. cat., Fernand Leger, 1911-1924, The Rhythm of Modern Life, Kunstmuseum, Wolfsburg, 1994, p. 53). The subjects in the paintings--soldiers smoking and at leisure--are reworkings of classic subjects used previously by Cézanne and Picasso. The way that Léger treats them, however, is new and dramatic, particularly the form of the hand, which is depicted as a group of tubular clumps holding a cigarette. Whereas Le soldat uses the subdued palette of Cubism and an undefined background, both La partie de cartes and especially Le blessé move towards the more flattened, equalized backgrounds of the paintings of the 1920s. There is a second version of the present painting in the Milwaukee Art Museum, Le blessé II, painted in 1920 (Bauquier, no. 241). It is less direct than the present work, farther from Léger's wartime experience and closer to the more decorative pictures of the 1920s.