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Artist or Maker: Fernand Léger (1881-1955)
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Provenance: Private collection, Paris.
Curt Valentin Gallery, New York (by 1952).
Acquired from the above by the late owners, 13 August 1952.
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Exhibited: The Baltimore Museum of Art, Modern Art for Baltimore, February-March 1957.
New York, Sidney Janis Gallery, Fernand Léger: Major Themes, January 1957, no. 4 (illustrated).
New York, Galerie Chalette, Collage 1912-1964, November 1964.
Paris, Galeries Nationales d'Exposition du Grand Palais, Fernand Léger, October 1971-January 1972, p. 48, no. 28 (illustrated).
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Literature: C. Green, Léger and the Avant-Garde, New Haven, 1976, p. 106 (illustrated, p. 107).
The Selma & Israel Rosen Collection, Baltimore, 1986 (illustrated). G. Bauquier, Fernand Léger, catalogue raisonné de l'oeuvre peint, Paris, 1990, vol. I, p. 180, no. 97 (illustrated in color, p. 181).
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Notes: PROPERTY FROM THE COLLECTION OF SELMA AND ISRAEL ROSEN
Germany declared war on Russia on 1 August 1914, igniting the First World War. Léger, who was well into his 33rd year, had done his peace time year of military service in 1902 in an engineer and sapper regiment, and was called up for service on 2 August, the day before Germany declared war on France and invaded Belgium. He rejoined his old unit, and alarmed at the extremely dangerous work that would likely fall his lot, he tried to have his lawyer Louis Poughon, a childhood friend who had connections in the government, get him reassigned to less hazardous duty. He was unsuccessful and was sent to the front by the end of the month.
In the beginning of October Léger's regiment was deployed in the Argonne forest. In a letter to Poughon on 5 October he wrote, "As an impression, it's extraordinary; I say 'extraordinary' because, for me, the phase of being horrified has long passed. One gets used to everything. It's the squad, this little family of ten fellows, that is the backbone of the whole machine. It's truly splendid, with these men you have no sense of effort, they're so good at the job. I remain an uprooted civilian, and someone who exhibits surprise and admiration that are inexplicable to them" (quoted in Fernand Leger 1911-1924, Le rhythme de la vie moderne, exh. cat., Basel, 1994, p. 67). In the summer of 1915 the Argonne became the scene of the bloodiest fighting on the Western Front to date. As a sapper Léger helped to dig tunnels in no-man's land; he lived constantly under enemy bombardment, even in rest areas behind the lines. Léger was lightly wounded in July, and in August he received a short period of leave in Paris. He remained stationed in the Argonne at until sometime after September; in October he was reassigned as a stretcher-bearer.
Léger made drawings whenever he could; they show his comrades in the trenches. One drawing, Soldats dans un abri, dated 'MF [Maison Forestière 15,' depicts a card game in a dugout; it became the impetus for the present painting, one of only a half dozen that he managed to execute that year. Two of these were decorations for his captain quarters, (Bauquier, nos. 98 and 99), another was landscape of the front done the cross-section of a log (B., no. 95), and this one, like two others (B., nos. 94 and 96) were done on cracked wooden panels taken from munitions crates. Here he followed the method he used in his iconic Contrastes de formes paintings in 1913-1914: he quickly laid in outlines of cylindrical and planar shapes in black paint, and then added highlights in white. Lacking color pigments, he improvised in soldierly fashion by pasting down scraps of dark blue, red and yellow paper. The reds and yellows have since almost completely faded, now blending with the ochre color of the wood. These elements, as Christopher Green has noted, "and the roughness of the untreated wood accentuates the flatness of the effect, creating an image as concentrated and dynamic as any developed in the purer circumstances of peace-time Montparnasse" (op. cit., p. 106).
Leger later served at Verdun. He was gassed at Aisne in the spring of 1917, and later that year he was hospitalized by a severe attack of rheumatism, which effectively ended his service at the front. He used the subject of the present painting for his most famous war-time composition, La partie des cartes, which he completed in November 1917 while convalescing in Paris (B., no. 102; fig. 1).
(fig. 1) Fernand Leger, La partie des cartes, 1917. Rijkmuseum Kröller-Müller, Otterloo. BARCODE 23659407
