The more
I look at pictures, the more I am delighted, moved and intrigued by what I
find. I’m sure that the name Georges Paul Leroux (1877-1957) is one unfamiliar
to many, but his work is alternately beautiful and disturbing. He is something of a forgotten master, and I
suspect that this is a result of the historical moment in which he lived, and
his stark, bleak representations of The Great War.
Surely a
look at the Academic male nude below demonstrates his mastery of form, his
coolly controlled drawing and his sensitivity to light and dark. However, these qualities became less relevant
as the Twentieth Century progressed, and the vapid tropes of Modernism came to
the fore. As Leroux grew older, the
fundamental artistic language he spoke was lost.
Leroux
was born in Paris, son of Gustav Ferdinand Leroux, a printer of art
prints. Leroux and his brother, Auguste,
would study art in Trelly, before serving in the 130 Infantry Regiment,
completing his military service in Chartres,
where he would regularly draw and paint the cathedral. It was in Chartres that he met painter Paul Jouve (1978-1973), who became his
lifelong friend.
Leroux
studied at the national School of
Decorative Arts and the Ecole
Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts, later working in the studio of Leon Bonnat (1833-1922). Leroux painted many slice-of-life pictures of
Paris before going to Rome in 1907. He
would grow to love the Italy, and he would return there almost every year to
paint the Italian countryside. On
Friday, we will look at his most beautiful Italian picture.
The
Great War, however, changed much of his life.
He would marry Mathilde Gabrielle Planquais in Meudon in 1915, and his
international travels were curtailed by the War. It was after the War that Leroux would paint two
of his masterful war pictures.
In Eparges, 1915, Leroux depicts the stark horrors
of war in a manner less grotesque than Goya,
but equally compelling. The Great War
irrevocably changed the notions of warfare in the popular imagination. The tens of thousands of dead – an entire
Lost Generation – erased visions of heroic leaders cleaving through anonymous
cannon fodder, the heavens above heralding the victory of God’s chosen. Rather, greater access to communications,
photographs and written first-hand narratives underscored the fact that war
involved vast quantities of mud, blood, pain, and dead men.
It is
the dead, in fact, that create the focal point of In Eparges, 1915. Look at the living figures in this
fascinating picture. The living men find
the corpse of a comrade, examining his papers to identify him before lowering
him into the grave that the others are digging.
But all of these men are anonymous – faces are turned from us, or in
shadow. It is almost as if the living
were the ghosts … and the dead man the only animated figure.
The off
white the dead man’s shirt and the focus of light on his white head and hands provide
the human focal point. His uniform lies crumpled beside him (obviously stripped
off by his brother soldiers) – he is no longer a soldier, a figure representing
a nation or an ideology, but simply a dead man.
There is no excessive gore or carnage to inspire horror – it is just our
stark humanity laid bare. That, I think,
is the root of the picture’s power.
The
landscape is dotted with simple, hand-made crosses; the upturned mud littered
with burial tools and stones. The only
hint of transcendence, aside from the peaceful look on the dead man’s face, are
the faint stars above. I cannot but help
think the dead man looks at the stars, or that the stars look down on him. Otherwise, the circumstances surrounding the dead
man would be too terrible to contemplate.
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