Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [207]
Léger was gassed at Verdun, and at the end of 1917 he was let out of the hospital and discharged from the army. But to the day of his death, in 1955, he never forgot the strength, the endurance, the total realism, the quick wit, and the uncomplaining good sense of his comrades-in-arms. Nor did he stop believing that civilian life would one day reward them for their offhand and undeceived heroism. If his paintings could bring that day nearer, or if they could indicate the conditions in which it would come about, so much the better. He was, however, very careful at the start not to sentimentalize the working man, or to assign him a more important place in the cities of the future than he would actually occupy.
In the great metropolitan paintings that Léger produced in 1919 and 1920—above all, in The City—human beings play a subordinate part. Objects among other objects, they are not individualized: individuality was kept for moments when, as in The Mechanic, the working man was off duty and could smoke a cigarette. But he was not diminished, in Léger’s eyes, by his objecthood. Rather, it raised him to the same level—that of a functional elegance, a stripped-down beauty without precedent—that was the mark of every other element in the new metropolitan scene.
Not everyone, of course, looked with such favor on the first machine age. In the early 1920s Karl Čapek’s R.U.R. was welcomed in theaters all over the world for its defeatist preview of robot society. In 1932 René Clair’s À nous la liberté was enormously popular for its portrait of the dehumanizing effect of industrialization. Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936) is a further and definitive example of this same disenchantment. But Léger did not stand alone in his optimistic approach to the problems of the postwar world. In the social strivings of the 1920s the machine had a fundamental, and it was hoped a benevolent, part to play.
Léger made new friends who agreed with him on these issues—especially the great architect Le Corbusier, who in 1925 gave him his first opportunity as a mural painter. Léger also involved himself in filmmaking, stage design, and book illustration. He had a sure instinct for the people with whom it would be most worthwhile to collaborate: Darius Milhaud in music, André Malraux as a beginner in literature, Abel Gance and Man Ray in the cinema. What he did in association with them reached, as often as not, only a small audience, but he never quite lost the expansionist dream—the notion of a world in which art would be for everyone and everyone would be for art.
By 1924, it seemed to him as though that world was almost in sight, if only people would acknowledge it. There was no limit to the potential of the machine as a creator of beauty. There was no reason why, not only the shopwindows and billboards, but the entire architecture of the city street should not be a carnival for the eye. The automobile shows of the mid-1920s would have emptied the museums and bankrupted the theaters, in Léger’s view, if it were not for what he called “the hierarchical prejudice.” “There are no hierarchies in art,” he said over and over again; it was for the skilled craftsman to realize that what he produced was more beautiful than most of what people went to see in the Louvre.
The role of color in all this was primordial, and Léger never lost an opportunity of listing the benefits that would follow from the liberation of color in everyday life. He told Trotsky about them, when he and Trotsky met in Montparnasse during World War I. He told his students about them, when he lectured at Yale in 1938. And, quite rightly, he took a great pride in the fact of his own influence in the matter. “In 1919, I painted The City with pure colors laid flat on the canvas. It was a revolutionary step. I proved that