The exhibition “Ah, How Cubist is War!” Fernand Léger and the Great War revisits the artist’s journey during the three years he spent on the front lines, first as a sapper and then as a stretcher-bearer.
In August 1914, the cubist painter Fernand Léger received a mobilization order. It was war, the beginning of a dirty conflict that would last four years. Torn from his Parisian life among avant-garde painters, Léger, like millions of soldiers, found himself trapped and faced with the horrors of a conflict that, as the months went by, took on an industrial scale.
Paintings and drawings in grisaille evoke the mobilization, the long months spent in the Argonne, and then in Verdun.
The intimacy of his thoughts and feelings will be revealed in a “Listening Room” where letters he wrote to his loved ones are read: at times terrified, often furious or desperate, he is also enthused by the mechanical beauty of artillery and profoundly admiring of his trench comrades.
The last room, dedicated to the mechanical paintings of the 1920s, shows an aesthetic break in Fernand Léger’s work after the war.
A contemporary sound creation by Simon Nicolas and Diane Blondeau accompanies the exhibition.
