La Partie de cartes

In 1917 the war was in its fourth year, and Léger was away from the front only because a gas attack at Verdun had sent him to hospital. He painted this canvas in Paris while he recovered. The subject came straight from the trenches, where he had sketched his comrades hunched over a game of cards. Here three soldiers sit around a table, their arms like lengths of forged steel pipe, their heads built from cones and plates. The small things of a soldier's life are all there, helmets, medals, pipes and the cards themselves, made of the same hard stuff as the men who hold them. Léger later called it the first picture in which he deliberately took his subject from his own time, and in 1954 he described it as an image of a robotized humanity.