and sculptors who suffered from First World War neurological wounds are scarce. Nevertheless, their injuries led to intense modifications of artistic practice. We detail four examples of artists whose creative mind was impacted by their First World War neurological wounds or diseases. The painter Jean-Julien Lemordant (1878–1968), who suffered from blindness after his injury, stopped his artistic work and became an icon of Franco-American friendship. The sculptor Maurice Prost (1894–1967), suffering from a neuroma due to the loss of his arm, built a special device to continue his work as a wildlife artist. The painter Georges Braque (1882–1963) was trepanned but carried on with his cubist work without ever mentioning the conflict. Conversely, the painter Fernand Léger (1881–1955), who suffered from a war neurosis, produced a significant war testimony through drawings and letters.
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The First World War mobilized millions of soldiers from all social classes and occupations. Artists did not escape this mobilization. Some of them even enlisted to fight on the battlefield. The French Minister of Fine Arts, Albert Dalimier (1875–1936), stated during the conflict that the artist should be as pugnacious in battle as he is facing his work. Writers who returned wounded from the war were numerous and some of their stories are well known, such those by Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918) or Blaise Cendrars (1887–1961) [Tatu and Bogousslavsky, 2016].
Historiography also lists a number of cases of painters and sculptors who suffered from a severe First World War injury. Among them, neurological wounds were scarce but led to intense modifications of artistic practice, even when the wound did not affect the “tekhnè,” i.e., the pragmatic knowledge, shared by artists and craftsmen, which allows the completion of a work [Maingon, in press].
In this chapter, we detail four examples of artists whose creative mind was deeply modified by their neurological war wounds or diseases. The painter Jean-Julien Lemordant (1878–1968), a blind war veteran, stopped his artistic work and became an icon of Franco-American friendship. The sculptor Maurice Prost (1894–1967), despite a neuroma due to the loss of his arm, showed his resiliency by building a special device to continue his work as a wildlife artist. The painter Georges Braque (1882–1963), who was trepanned after his war wound, carried on with his cubist work without ever mentioning the conflict. Conversely, the painter Fernand Léger (1881–1955), who suffered from a war neurosis, has left us a significant war testimony through drawings and letters.
Jean-Julien Lemordant: The “Painter with Closed Eyelids”
From Piero della Francesca (ca. 1412–1492) to Claude Monet (1840–1926), the history of art includes many examples of artists suffering from visual disorders. For most of them, physiological aging was the cause of their blindness. A significantly different cause was responsible for the visual disorders of the painter Jean-Julien Lemordant, who became famous during the First World War as the “painter with closed eyelids” [Peinte, 1922].
After training at the regional art school of Rennes, then in Paris, Lemordant was an artist specialized in painting Breton life. Using bright colors, he had an interest in impressionnism. In August 1914, Lemordant was mobilized as an officer in the 41st French infantry regiment. He was slightly wounded many times in August and September 1914. Then, on October 3rd, 1914, he received a more consequent injury during an attack against German positions near Neuville-Vitasse in northern France. He explained that he received a bullet in the left hand, another in the right knee, and a third in the head [Dayot, 1915]. He remained on the battlefield for 3 days before German stretcher-bearers took him to the rear of the frontline. He was made a prisoner in Cambrai, a town in northern France occupied by German troops, and then sent to Germany. He remained imprisoned in a military hospital in Amberg and later in the Ingolstadt fortress. Because his medical condition worsened, he was evacuated to Interlaken in Switzerland and eventually repatriated to France in August 1916, he was admitted in the Parisian hospital Val-de-Grâce, where he underwent several surgical procedures on the skull and facial bones. The bullet he received induced a severe brain injury [Lanthony, 1999, p. 116]. After a long convalescence period, he was examined by several medical military commissions whose reports described his neurologic condition at that time: “Blindness. Left hemiparesis. Definitive ankylosis of the right knee in extension. Coin-sized pulsatile loss of substance in the occipital region. Jacksonian epileptic seizures. Stiff neck. Adherences limiting flexion of the trunk and right upper limb movements” (Archives Départementales d’Illeet-Vilaine, fiche matricule de Jean-Julien Lemordant, 1R 875, Rennes, France; Archives of the International Committee of the Red Cross, AICR, Geneva, Switzerland). As a war-wounded soldier, Lemordant was awarded the Légion d’honneur.
Fig. 1. Jean Julien Lemordant (public domain).
After his brain injury, Lemordant stopped all artistic production. However, he put his image of a war-wounded soldier to good use. In 1917, during a great exhibition in Paris, he received the President of the French Republic, lying in bed and in full military dress amidst his paintings [Flament, 1917]. He was frequently photographed in various staged situations and generously distributed the photographs. Lemordant was easily recognizable with his lieutenant kepi over a headband covering part of his head (Fig. 1). As a war hero, he was chosen for propaganda travels in the USA, even though his medical doctors were reluctant to allow him to travel regarding his clinical condition. Between 1918 and 1921, he spent several months in the USA, lecturing on French art and describing his work during exhibitions organized in New York and Chicago by the French art dealer René Gimpel (1881–1945). Lemordant was made a Doctor by Yale University. Embodying mutilated France, he became an icon of Franco-American friendship.
The end of Lemordant’s medical history was unexpected. In 1934, after another surgical procedure, he was involved in a car crash and suddenly recovered some measure of visual capacities [Guyon, 1935]. This final twist gave weight to some claims that Lemordant had never been blind, but merely took advantage of his supposed disability.
Maurice Prost: The Resilient Body
The amputation of a limb, especially an upper limb or a hand, is a cruel condition for an artist. This has led some artists to try to use a prothesis with a utilitarian or esthetic purpose. Nevertheless, they frequently discarded their protheses because they induced an exacerbation of stump pain. Phantom limb phenomena and stump neuromas were also obstacles to the use of a prothesis [Tatu et al., 2014]. The sculptor Maurice Prost, whose left upper limb was amputated after a war injury, is a good example of this.
At the outbreak of the war, Prost was a student in jewelry. He began the war in the 147th infantry regiment and received a bullet in the left arm in October 1914 in the Argonne offensives. His injured limb was amputated at the lower third of the arm in a military hospital. The surgeon predicted that he would never be able to practice sculpture again [Maingon, 2014]. Stump pain due to a neuroma prevented Prost from using a prothesis. He was declared an invalid with the following diagnosis: amputation of left upper limb, stump neuroma, impossibility to use a prothesis and cardiac disturbances (Carte d’invalidité de Maurice Prost; Musée Robert Dubois-Corneau, Brunoy, France).
Fig. 2. Maurice Prost and his robotic arm. From Musée Robert Dubois-Corneau, Brunoy, France, with kind permission.
Obviously, the mutilation reduced Prost’s physical capacity. He had to try new artistic methods, adapted to his handicap. He underwent rehabilitation and then became a drawing teacher. Against all odds, he eventually decided to devote himself to one of the more demanding artistic techniques:
