Pencil on paper
21.2 x 16.3 cm
Donated by Nadia Léger and Georges Bauquier
Musée national Fernand Léger Inv. 96018

On the front, stretcher-bearer and all too often gravedigger, Léger drew when he could after the fighting, on letter-cards or on the back of staff maps. Testimonies to the war, his drawings were sent along with letters to Jeanne, his friends and his family. They were a way of making up for the fact that he couldn’t paint. At each trial, a new production of drawings relates the corpses in pieces, the ruined towns and mangled forms sinking into the mud and ashes. The Cubist dividing-up conjures up the chaotic landscape of the trenches and bodies blown to pieces in an altogether surprising manner. Léger makes the comparison himself, incidentally, in a letter to Jeanne dated 28th March 1915: “There is nothing more Cubist than a war such as this, which blows a chap more or less cleanly into several pieces and sends him to the four cardinal points ...”
The presence of men – anonymous heroes – and the importance of objects amidst this chaos are a revelation for the man and artist. Exhausted, after several admissions to hospital in 1917 before being temporarily discharged on health grounds, Léger joins Jeanne in Vernon for his convalescence. Referring to a selection of his drawings from the front, he painted The Game of cards where decorated soldiers resembling robots depict the chaos of the war. In Paris, for Blaise Cendrars who lost his arm at the front, he illustrated J’ai Tué, published in La Belle Edition in 1918.