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Lot Essay
"On my return from the war, I continued to make use of what I had felt at the front for three years, I used geometrical forms; this will be called the mechanical period"
Fernand Léger
Léger served on the front lines during the First World War, first as a sapper and then as a stretcher-bearer. He was slightly wounded and later gassed. He painted whenever he could obtain leave to Paris, and it was on one such occasion in September 1917 that he fell seriously ill with rheumatism. He spent the following months in military hospitals and was finally diagnosed with pulmonary tuberculosis. During this period he painted his wartime masterwork, La partie des cartes (Bauquier, no. 102; Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo), which he inscribed on the reverse "fait à Paris en convalescence." He was invalided out of the service in June 1918, five months before the signing of the Armistice, and immediately signed an exclusive contract with Léonce Rosenberg, who had become the leading dealer for the Cubists during the war, and was finally able to resume painting full-time.
Within a short time as part of a wider post-war classicizing trend (embodied most famously in the work of Picasso), a new humanism began to assert itself, and Léger returned to the human form. Whereas the geometrical shapes of the mechanical period were dynamic and often spatially ambiguous, Léger's newer conception of form was static and volumetric. This transformation is clear in the present work. The wheel or gear, emblematic of technology and industry, remains a significant element in the composition, but out of this geometrical matrix a clearly human presence materializes.
Léger's wartime experiences, in which he witnessed the wholesale carnage of mechanized slaughter first-hand, did not deter him from returning to the cylindrical, machine-inspired elements that he had introduced into his celebrated pre-war contrastes de formes paintings. These forms now shed their generalized and abstract character and took on a more descriptive and material specificity. Léger understood the impact of the war as an irrefutable sign that society had broken with old values and that the emergence of a new, modern reality was at hand. He sought to counter the increasingly conservative and classical ideals of the postwar Paris avant-garde with his own message of new subjects drawn from the reality of modern life, represented in a brashly dissonant and dynamic pictorial language. He wrote to his pre-war dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, still living in Swiss exile, in December 1919: "I have used mechanical elements a lot in my pictures these last two years; my present method is adapting itself to this, and I find in it an element of variety and intensity. The modern way of life is full of such elements for us; we must know how to use them. Every age brings with it some new elements which should serve us; the great difficulty is to translate them into plastic terms" (quoted in J. Cassou and J. Leymarie, op. cit., p. 45).
Fernand Léger
Léger served on the front lines during the First World War, first as a sapper and then as a stretcher-bearer. He was slightly wounded and later gassed. He painted whenever he could obtain leave to Paris, and it was on one such occasion in September 1917 that he fell seriously ill with rheumatism. He spent the following months in military hospitals and was finally diagnosed with pulmonary tuberculosis. During this period he painted his wartime masterwork, La partie des cartes (Bauquier, no. 102; Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo), which he inscribed on the reverse "fait à Paris en convalescence." He was invalided out of the service in June 1918, five months before the signing of the Armistice, and immediately signed an exclusive contract with Léonce Rosenberg, who had become the leading dealer for the Cubists during the war, and was finally able to resume painting full-time.
Within a short time as part of a wider post-war classicizing trend (embodied most famously in the work of Picasso), a new humanism began to assert itself, and Léger returned to the human form. Whereas the geometrical shapes of the mechanical period were dynamic and often spatially ambiguous, Léger's newer conception of form was static and volumetric. This transformation is clear in the present work. The wheel or gear, emblematic of technology and industry, remains a significant element in the composition, but out of this geometrical matrix a clearly human presence materializes.
Léger's wartime experiences, in which he witnessed the wholesale carnage of mechanized slaughter first-hand, did not deter him from returning to the cylindrical, machine-inspired elements that he had introduced into his celebrated pre-war contrastes de formes paintings. These forms now shed their generalized and abstract character and took on a more descriptive and material specificity. Léger understood the impact of the war as an irrefutable sign that society had broken with old values and that the emergence of a new, modern reality was at hand. He sought to counter the increasingly conservative and classical ideals of the postwar Paris avant-garde with his own message of new subjects drawn from the reality of modern life, represented in a brashly dissonant and dynamic pictorial language. He wrote to his pre-war dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, still living in Swiss exile, in December 1919: "I have used mechanical elements a lot in my pictures these last two years; my present method is adapting itself to this, and I find in it an element of variety and intensity. The modern way of life is full of such elements for us; we must know how to use them. Every age brings with it some new elements which should serve us; the great difficulty is to translate them into plastic terms" (quoted in J. Cassou and J. Leymarie, op. cit., p. 45).