George Paul Leroux, Part III: Leroux in Heaven

After the horrors of the Great War, Leroux returned each year to his haven, Rome.  Amazingly, the horrors of the conflict did not embitter his art forever … as it had for many.  As can be seen here, Leroux returned to, and embraced, life.

This is actually quite an idyllic picture.  The youths bathe in the Tiber, kissed by the glorious Italian sunshine.  Leroux depicts their nude bodies with a wonderful innocence and forming a perfect triangle between the boat’s mast and the diver.

Not surprisingly, the one clothed figure is separated from the rest of the group –and he looks on, perhaps feeling his exclusion.  Perhaps Leroux is saying that happiness is natural … the bathing suit is of a color with the man-made landscape in the background. 

I like to think of Leroux in Italy, making beautiful things, cleansed after putting the carnage of the Great War, with all of its pain and its horror, behind him.

George Paul Leroux, Part II: Leroux in Hell

Since the vivid horrors that flooded American living rooms during television coverage of the Viet Nam war, we have been shielded from graphic images of war and its victims in-and-out of uniform.  Perhaps if looking at the day-to-day dying during war returned to our sanitized television sets, with its mud and its senseless carnage, there would be fewer armed conflicts.  Certainly American citizens would be less willing to allow our elected leaders to engage in mechanized manslaughter.

First-hand accounts of the Great War started early.  Because of an increased literacy among the rising middle class, more and more books and newspaper accounts were available, bringing the realities of the conflict into stark relief.  Following is an account by Fernand Léger about the siege of Verdun, penned on November 7th 1916:  I climbed up to the top of the gully I am in. Behind me was Fleury, and in front of me Vaux and Douaumont. I could see out over an area of ten square kilometres that had been turned into a uniform desert of brown earth. The men were all so tiny and lost in it that I could hardly see them. A shell fell in the midst of these little things, which moved for a moment, carrying off the wounded - the dead, as unimportant as so many ants, were left behind. They were no bigger than ants down there. The artillery dominates everything. A formidable, intelligent weapon, striking everywhere with such desperate consistency.

Leroux painted Hell (L’Enfer) in 1921, and it can currently be seen in the Imperial War Museum.  The picture represents the experience of serving on the Western Front – where war became industrialized.  The picture was probably inspired by the 1916 battles in defense of Verdun.  The French Army lost nearly half a million men between February and December 1916 repelling repeated German attacks.  Staggering casualties occurred on both sides, but the face of warfare changed from hand to hand combat to high-tech artillery bombardments.

Leroux frames the grotesque image with an arch of brown smoke (created, no doubt, by the background fires).  The landscape is littered with corpses and with blasted trees; there is no life or vegetation on view, and it almost seems as if the earth were coughing up corpses.

A mud hole is filled with dead or dying men, and others trying to escape.  Taken out of its Great War context, and it could easily serve as an illustration of the Biblical Hell.  Leroux consciously draws on centuries artistic depictions of hell to tell his story; the picture quakes with echoes of Dante and Bosch.  The fires, which serve to maximize our attention on foreground figures, also highlight several blasted trees that almost look like ruined crosses.  Here, Leroux says, there is no hope for salvation.

In yesterday’s painting, In Eparges, 1915, Leroux showed us the face of an everyman finding repose in death; here we do not even have the solace of the grave.

Tomorrow – a beautiful picture from Leroux’s long-term love affair with Italy.

George Paul Leroux, Part I

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.