Machine Modernism, Masculinity, and the Trauma of War: The Art of Fernand Léger

Long considered the embodiment of national resilience and fraternal loyalty in the wake of World War I, Fernand L嶲er's art overshadows a far less heroic story, one that prompts a demythification of his legendary identification with the working class and provokes important questions about psychic trauma. This book draws on L嶲er's wartime letters to reassess his work and present an entirely new perspective on how the artist's war experience informed his art.

Maureen G. Shanahan traces the legacy of war and historical trauma in L嶲er's work and uses the crisis of masculinity generated by World War I to explain the contradictions and paradoxes of his art and writing during and after the war. Drawing upon psychoanalytic and gender theory as well as memory studies, Shanahan historicizes the work of L嶲er and the Purist art movement within the psychiatric discourse of the era and anxieties about neurasthenia, which was associated with German Expressionism, Dada, and New Objectivity artists. Notably, Shanahan dismantles L嶲er's machine aesthetic as a utopian and regenerative investment and explores the significance of L嶲er's collectives of soldiers, female nudes, mass-produced objects, divers, and cyclists--his "machine men"--as vehicles for displacing trauma and disavowing loss.

Informed by extensive archival research, this volume turns L嶲er into a case study of Cubism's most radical moment, machine modernism's relationship to war trauma, and aesthetic positions between Socialist Realism and geometric abstraction.