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Fernand LEGER

L'une des plus sublimes lettres de Fernand Léger

La Maison-Forestière (Argonne) 28 mai 1915, 13,4x21,3cm, 4 pp. sur un feuillet double.

One of the most magnificent letters by Fernand Léger

A fabulous handwritten letter by the painter Fernand Léger, written on the front line during the Battle of Argonne, addressed to the Parisian art trader Adolphe Basler.
92 lines in black ink, four pages on a double leaf, dated 28 May 1915 by Léger.
The handwritten letter is presented with a half forest green morocco chemise, green paper boards with a stylised motif, endpapers lined with green lamb, slip case lined with the same morocco, the piece is signed by Goy & Vilaine.
The letter was chosen for Cécile Guilbert's anthology, Les Plus Belles Lettres manuscrites de Voltaire à Édith Piaf, Robert Laffont, 2014.
A true masterpiece of correspondence, this exceptional missive by Fernand Léger shows that the experience of the trenches is of fundamental importance to his future work. Sent to the Engineering troops in 1914, Léger spent two years on the front at Argonne, in the Maison-Forestière section, from where he writes this letter on 28 May 1915, “pendant que les obus [lui] passent au-dessus de la tête,” “while shells were passing over his head.” In complete freedom of tone and form, the Célinian charm of this style is a surprise and is a sign of the “mécanique,” “mechanical” period of his post-war painting. Through his letter we witness his political conscience awakening to contact with the men he has met on the front line, whose merit and bravery made their mark on the painter. His particularly clear analysis of the inhumanity of the war gives this missive a place amongst the most beautiful combat letters of the first World War.
Fernand Léger is replying to Adolphe Basler, a Polish art critic, who was Guillaume Apollinaire's secretary and a trader of paintings. Basler probably met Léger around 1910, since he was a member of the “bande à Picasso,” “Picasso's gang” and was strongly influenced by Cubism alongside Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck and Max Jacob. Trying his hand at monochrome and then at abstraction, Léger applies the principles of form decomposition and perspective distortion. His work with Cubists becomes premonitory of the pending apocalypse. Some years later, this Cubist vocabulary in fact becomes, for Léger, the perfect illustration of the war, which he describes to Basler: “It is linear and abrupt like a geometry problem. So many shells, for such a long time, on such a surface, so many men every metre, ready to go at any given time.” More than ever the Cubist innovation allowed the contemporary world to be translated, swaying between rationalism and chaos.
Contact with the trenches causes a real upheaval, both intellectual and artistic, for the painter. As Blaise Cendrars comments,  “It was at war that Fernand Léger had a sudden revelation of the depth of today...”. Léger tell Basler of his vision of an industrial, inhumane and depersonalised war: “The wavering is over. It is a war without ‘waste.' Everything goes. Everything is organised for maximum return. This war is the perfect orchestration of the all methods of killing, old and new. It is intelligent through and through. It is even annoying, there is nothing left that is unexpected.” Léger's pertinent analysis was reflected in his post-war canvases by very calculated and balanced aesthetics, a “rendement pictural,” “painting output,” of the image of the modern war in which he took part. For Léger, the Cubist lesson is accompanied by a deep reflection of modernity and “the modern men,” that he wishes to represent in his painting.
The letter shows the gestation of his post-war painting style, keeping the Cubist elements while making his canvases more vibrant with color and patterns taken from his time in the trenches.  In fact, Léger gives Adolphe Basler a glimpse of his famous “période mécanique,” “mechanical period,” in the 1920s, of which the prophetic sentence is a foreshadow: “This all goes off mechanically.” Weapons of mass destruction haunt the everyday life of the artist-soldier as much as they inspire him:  “An attack is terrible, when men who were subjected to infernal artillery fire for hours were flattened into holes, reduced to the state of poor little things, when we order these men to leave their shelter, to breakthrough a railing and to go on to the machine guns with their bayonet.” Following this experience, the tubular and circular structures of the shells, the machine guns and the bayonets were incorporated into the pictorial language.  Léger had understood that painting had to compete with the manufactured object, and jump on the modernity bandwagon.  He uses both straight lines and curves as a subject (éléments mécaniques, 1920, Metropolitan museum of Art, Les Hélices, 1918, Museum of Modern Art) or material for his portraits (Le Mécanicien, 1919, Boston Museum of Fine arts). His soldier comrades that were “reduced to the state of poor little things,” give rise to a new anatomy, composed of limited geometric forms: cubes for the head and the torso, circular tubes for the arms, circles for the joints.
Léger once again unveils his visionary talents with a striking clairvoyance on the true stakes of war, which he foretells in this letter from the beginning of the year 1915.  He anticipated the German defeat in the advanced arms race, effectively beaten at the technical level two years later with the arrival of the American tanks: “The Boches are marvellous since they are fighting a war with the most modern means possible. They are absolutely right. But they were wrong in not knowing how to use them a little better from the start or quick enough to stop others from assessing their things and throwing the ball back to them.” After this ironic demonstration of the superiority of the French side, Léger finishes his letter to Basler, himself a volunteer, on the assurance of victory: “In September [1914] we started a war which was at first ridiculous, but now it's something else, we have pillaged them and exceptionally, when our turn, we really have more talent than them and since they do not have the genius, we will have them.”
Moreover, the war unveiled a political conscience in him that will guide all of this future work, until his illustration of Eluard's poem Liberté.  His brothers in arms, whom he used for models during the war years, inspired his famous canvases and directed him post-war towards a resolutely popular art, born from the camaraderie that he mentions at the beginning of the letter: “I am calm, the artillerymen told me that I was in a “corner position,” in other words unreachable by the Boche shells. I trust these people, they know their job well.” It was during these two
 
 
years of combat that he discovered art's social function, abandoning his brief period of abstraction for a figurative art serving the communist cause. Although he did not officially join the French Communist Party until 1945, in 1915 he already states in his letter: “Only modern men are able to make such an effort again. A professional army would not hold, but a people who have lived through the tense and hard life of the past 50 years can do it.” Considering himself as a worker-painter, sometimes known as “vanguard peasant,” he demonstrates his deep respect for the modern worker in his letter and in his work. Under the guise of celebrating the invincibility of the modern man, here Léger denounces his enslavement: “A war like this is only possible because of the people who do it. It is as awful as the economic struggle. Times of peace also with the only difference that we kill people. It is not enough to turn factors around. It is the same thing. These people who do it, the rest of us, we are offered this hypocrisy.” His political and artistic involvement starts in 1917 with his famous canvas “La Partie de cartes” (Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo), which uses both organic and mechanical forms to depict those who were killed in combat.
Léger, who was deprived of painting during his three years of service, maintained rich correspondence whilst at the front with those close to him who had stayed behind the line.  Our letter is an exceptional example of the beauty and ease of the painter's epistolary style – his reply to Basler is littered with dignified passages with the gall of Céline or of his friend Cendrars, with the same sinister and perverse violence: “It is only behind the lines that we are weak enough to whine about the stories of the bombed Reims Cathedral or the women who are put on by the Boches. It doesn't wash here at all. And Monsieur Barrès doesn't succeed at all. We don't think to ask those people who grant themselves the right to kill to respect monuments that may be historical or women who often have probably not asked for better.” The war brought out a unique language in Léger, that of Poilus, working-class and slang, whose deprivation, barrenness and cynicism spills over onto the reader. With a real talent for writing, he goes on to be the author of lectures, articles on the theory of painting, travel accounts and poetic texts.
It is through his correspondence with Basler that he reconnects with the Parisian painting art circles and for a few moments, escapes the fighting. He lets out a heartfelt appeal at the end of his letter (“My dear Monsieur Basler, talk to me about painting”) – he who hadn't had the opportunity to paint since 1917, after having come close to death at Verdun. His last lines probably allude to an exhibition project of his work in the United States: “I am thinking of America too, but when it is all over.” His first American retrospective was fulfilled in New York in 1925, and marks the beginning of a long series of journeys and paintings celebrating the modern American life.
Phenomenal and terrifying letter by Fernand Léger, artist-soldier exiled from his painting, who knew how to find the beauty of the modern world in the midst of chaos. The painter gives us a striking testimony of his political and pictorial awakening, shaped by and embedded with his experience of war.

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