.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Although La Fresnaye had done his military service in 1905, from which he had been discharged after a severe attack of pleurisy seriously weakened his lungs, the artist insisted on volunteering for the army when the First World War began in August 1914. He rejoined his old unit, and in the following month he was already on the front lines. He left uncompleted in his studio the painting Le Quatorze Juillet (Seligman 147; Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris), "an unfinished monument to an unfinished life" (Seligman, op. cit., p. 55). He did not take up drawing and painting in watercolors until there was a lull in the action in 1917. As Fernand Léger had done earlier in the war, La Fresnaye drew scenes around him, and made studies of his comrades-in-arms.
La Fresnaye's war scenes avoid description of the grotesquely scarred landscape at the front, and the unrelenting gore on the battlefield and in the trenches, and instead focus on the indomitable spirit of the men around him as they survive from day to day. They are depicted in their makeshift quarters, smoking, drinking, playing cards or enjoying an impromptu concert.
"The aloofness, so apparent in his pre-war paintings, was simply applied to his surroundings instead of to his fellow men. In the war sketches La Fresnaye's emotions are as abstract as the scenes he depicts; if he could no longer communicate with those who had shared his 'ancient et douce existence', those who shared the bitter present would understand. The war studies presaged developments in the final chapter of La Fresnaye's oeuvre. Though he was still reluctant to break the barriers which separated him from the realities of human suffering, he did indicate a willingness to become involved with human emotions--an involvement which was to reach a high point of expression in his last tragic years" (ibid., p. 62).
In the spring of 1918, when the arrival of the American Expeditionary Forces began to give some relief to units that had been continuously in combat for four years, La Fresnaye painted some landscapes and turned again to still-life subjects. Although these works retain some element of recognizable imagery, or use shorthand signs to denote the artist's motifs, the compositions are largely geometric and nearly abstract.
As Seligman has pointed out, the subject of the present work is somewhat obscure. The title denotes smoke in a dugout. Like Léger in his pre-war works, La Fresnaye enjoyed translating insubstantial clouds of smoke into the volumetric forms of Cubism, using interlocking circular shapes or a series of wavy lines (ibid., p. 195). Here a spiraling, amorphous billow of smoke fills the center of the composition; tables and benches are visible in the corners. The composition is constructed around a central vertical armature which is likely the figure of one of La Fresnaye's fellow soldiers. He is somewhat comically engulfed in the smoke of his own cigarette, although the scene may make more serious references to the residue of an explosion or a dreaded poison gas attack.
The smoke motif may appear ironic in the context of La Fresnaye's health. The war was hard on the artist's already tubercular lungs, and in September 1918, two months before the armistice ending the war was signed, he suffered two hemorrhages in his lungs and was evacuated to a hospital in Tours. La Fresnaye was subsequently discharged from the army, and after a brief stay in Paris, left for a sanatorium in Cambo in the foothills of the Pyrénées, where he began a battle for his health that lasted for the next seven years.
La Fresnaye's war scenes avoid description of the grotesquely scarred landscape at the front, and the unrelenting gore on the battlefield and in the trenches, and instead focus on the indomitable spirit of the men around him as they survive from day to day. They are depicted in their makeshift quarters, smoking, drinking, playing cards or enjoying an impromptu concert.
"The aloofness, so apparent in his pre-war paintings, was simply applied to his surroundings instead of to his fellow men. In the war sketches La Fresnaye's emotions are as abstract as the scenes he depicts; if he could no longer communicate with those who had shared his 'ancient et douce existence', those who shared the bitter present would understand. The war studies presaged developments in the final chapter of La Fresnaye's oeuvre. Though he was still reluctant to break the barriers which separated him from the realities of human suffering, he did indicate a willingness to become involved with human emotions--an involvement which was to reach a high point of expression in his last tragic years" (ibid., p. 62).
In the spring of 1918, when the arrival of the American Expeditionary Forces began to give some relief to units that had been continuously in combat for four years, La Fresnaye painted some landscapes and turned again to still-life subjects. Although these works retain some element of recognizable imagery, or use shorthand signs to denote the artist's motifs, the compositions are largely geometric and nearly abstract.
As Seligman has pointed out, the subject of the present work is somewhat obscure. The title denotes smoke in a dugout. Like Léger in his pre-war works, La Fresnaye enjoyed translating insubstantial clouds of smoke into the volumetric forms of Cubism, using interlocking circular shapes or a series of wavy lines (ibid., p. 195). Here a spiraling, amorphous billow of smoke fills the center of the composition; tables and benches are visible in the corners. The composition is constructed around a central vertical armature which is likely the figure of one of La Fresnaye's fellow soldiers. He is somewhat comically engulfed in the smoke of his own cigarette, although the scene may make more serious references to the residue of an explosion or a dreaded poison gas attack.
The smoke motif may appear ironic in the context of La Fresnaye's health. The war was hard on the artist's already tubercular lungs, and in September 1918, two months before the armistice ending the war was signed, he suffered two hemorrhages in his lungs and was evacuated to a hospital in Tours. La Fresnaye was subsequently discharged from the army, and after a brief stay in Paris, left for a sanatorium in Cambo in the foothills of the Pyrénées, where he began a battle for his health that lasted for the next seven years.