Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [206]
His was an accepting nature. He took change for granted, and welcomed it. That a new world should produce a new kind of art seemed to him not merely natural but axiomatic. Old-style aesthetes might wince to see red and yellow billboards set up among the halftones of the French countryside; Léger thought it was the best thing that could happen. New sights, new idioms, and new responses were what he lived by. “Modern man,” he said in 1914, “has to take in a hundred times as many impressions as came his way in the eighteenth century. Is it surprising that our language is full of diminutives and abbreviations? If modern paintings are highly condensed, and if the forms with them are taken apart and redistributed, it’s for the same reason.”
Léger by that time was a friend of poets like Apollinaire and Cendrars, and a friend and prized colleague of painters like Robert Delaunay and Le Douanier Rousseau. Like Picasso, Braque, Derain, Vlaminck, and Juan Gris, he showed his work in Paris at D. H. Kahnweiler’s little gallery near the Madeleine. He stood apart from the others, even so, in that when he tried his hand at a major work—the Nudes in the Forest of 1909–10—he instinctively chose a subject that involved people at work: naked woodsmen hacking away at tree trunks. It was a difficult, gloomy, almost monochromatic painting: the result of a long struggle, a “battle of volumes” as he said himself, to build the third dimension on flat canvas. “I wasn’t ready for color,” he said later.
Yet color was fundamental to modern life. The dynamic of that life, said Léger, was on the side of the poster in the street and the advertisement that lit up at night. “Post No Bills” was a ridiculous formula, well worthy of the society that sponsored it. “It’s the taste of the middle class that’s against posters,” he went on. “The peasant is made of stronger stuff. Look how he likes a strong contrast of color in his clothes! A man like that isn’t going to be scared by a billboard in a meadow.”
Machinery had new color, too. Léger never forgot how he went to a pioneer aviation show in Paris with Marcel Duchamp and Brancusi. As they walked among the prehistoric aircraft, with their exposed machinery and huge wooden propellers, Duchamp grew more and more silent. Suddenly he said: “Painting’s finished. How can we possibly compete with those propellers?” “I preferred the motors, myself,” Léger would say as he told the story, “but then I always preferred metal to wood.”
Léger had his fill of metal when he was drafted into the French army in 1914. Both as an artilleryman, from 1914 to 1916, and later as a stretcher bearer on the Verdun front, he saw as much as anyone of the horrors of war. But he never discussed them. What moved him was the human quality of his fellow soldiers and the immediate, unaffected beauty of the guns that he had to fire. He had been on the very edge, in 1912 and 1913, of a purely abstract art: an art based on contrasted forms that had no reference to the visible world. No sooner was he in the army than activity of that kind began to seem to him both petty and futile.
“There I was,” he said later, “on an equal footing with the totality of the French people. My new comrades were miners, laborers, metalworkers, woodcutters.… What faces they had! What a shrewd, lively, and completely down-to-earth understanding