living animals as models. He would go to the zoo every day to draw sketches of animals on the spot. At first, he worked with an assistant, usually his wife. He would use his right hand to hold the chisel but was unable to use the hammer at the same time. In 1927, he ordered a tailor-made device to compensate for his handicap. With his new, almost futuristic robotic arm, Maurice Prost regained his artistic autonomy. He realized numerous animal sculptures, in particular the famous Le Gorille femelle (The Female Gorilla). In self-portraits from the 1930s, Prost appeared with his robotic arm (Fig. 2).
Thus, the mutilation led Maurice Prost to find new efficient ways to create again. Nevertheless, the war is entirely absent from his work. He focused on animal sculpture. Prost showed signs of what is today called resiliency, a concept conceived nearly a century later by the neuropsychiatrist Boris Cyrulnik [2003] to define the capacity to overcome a traumatism. Gustave Pimienta (1888–1982), a sculptor who lost several fingers during the First World War, expressed the same resiliency in the 1960s: “It is possible that my disabilities and my limited energy support my work. The pain and tiredness following each of my efforts force me to focus on one essential task. My art is undoubtedly strengthened by my mutilation” [Florisoone, 1986, p. 31].
Fig. 3. Dedication of Blaise Cendrars to Georges Braque: “To Braque my old broken face, his old mate who’s (also) survived the Dum-Dum bullets” (private collection).
Georges Braque: The Trepanned Painter
After studies to become a painter-decorator in Paris, George Braque decided to devote himself to painting. Close to the artists of the Parisian avant-garde and to Guillaume Apollinaire, he was first interested in fauvism and befriended Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) during the peak period of cubism.
Braque was mobilized in the French army and became a sergeant at the end of 1914 in the 329th infantry regiment. He served on the Somme frontline close to the trenches where his friend, the Swiss writer Blaise Cendrars was fighting: “…Ah, had I known that, I would have been there to shake the hand of my good friend Braque” [Cendrars, 2013, p. 649] (Fig. 3).
Becoming an officer in the 224th infantry regiment, Braque was involved in the Artois offensive in the spring of 1915. As a commander, he had little time to draw, unlike other mobilized painters who brought back hundreds of drawings from the trenches. On May 11th, 1915, during the Neuville-Saint-Vaast offensives in the North of France, Braque’s head was hit by shrapnel. His metal helmet, only recently delivered to the French army, saved his life. Nevertheless, Braque was left for dead on the battlefield. He was eventually evacuated to the rear of the frontline by stretcher-bearers, suffering from a severe head injury.
Braque’s medical report detailed that he was first treated in a field ambulance and was later hospitalized, on May 30th, 1915, in the militarized Hôtel Meurice in Paris. Upon admission, he was diagnosed with the following: “Skull fracture in left fronto-parietal region. Trepanation” (Dossier Georges Braque; Service des Archives Médicales et Hospitalières des Armées, SAMHA, Limoges, France). Regarding the severity of his wound, it is likely that Braque was trepanned by the surgeon of the field ambulance to evacuate an extradural or an epidural hematoma. In July 1915, he was transferred to a military hospital in Bois-Colombes and was eventually discharged in 1917. Like most First World War wounded soldiers, Braque began a long procedure to obtain an invalidity pension. The archives related to this procedure detail his injury: a 4- by 1-cm groove in the left frontoparietal part of the skull, creating a pulsating scare (Archives Départementales de Seine-Maritime, fiche matricule de Georges Braque, 1R 3113, Rouen, France).
Braque progressively returned to civilian life. On January 14th, 1917, the Russian painter Marie Vassilieff (1884–1957) organized a banquet to celebrate his return. Cendrars, Picasso, and Henri Matisse (1869–1954) were invited to this dinner which was immortalized in a famous painting. The return to artistic practice was difficult for Braque: “I have suffered not only from the injury but also from being unable to paint for months. The mind was more affected than the body” [Danchev, 2013, p. 131]. These depressive symptoms were mainly related to his posttraumatic syndrome but also to the loss of brain substance due to the injury. Nevertheless, Braque resumed his artistic activities during his hospitalization to paint La Joueuse de Mandoline (Lille Métropole Museum of Modern, Contemporary and Outsider Art, LaM, Villeneuved’Ascq, France). This painting is an ambitious cubist portrait which does not show any artistic break with his prewar works. It announces one of his main paintings of that period, La Musicienne (Kunstmuseum, Basel, Switzerland), begun in 1917.
After his injury, Braque, like many painters, remained silent about the war, which is never featured in his work. He focused on art, grew closer to the painter Juan Gris (1887–1927), and started to write his reflections on painting [Braque, 1917].
Fernand Léger: Cubism at War
Fernand Léger first wanted to become an architect but soon turned to drawing. A part of the Parisian artistic avant-garde, he progressively began experimenting with cubism. In 1914 he was mobilized in an engineer regiment. In contrast to Georges Braque, Léger drew, wrote and painted a lot during the war and his work was deeply influenced by the conflict.
He was involved in the offensives of Argonne and Verdun. As a stretcherbearer, he was very close to human suffering and frequently witnessed violent scenes. His letters are original mainly because they address infrequent, even taboo war issues. For example, in his letter to his friend Louis Poughon (1882–1959), Léger starkly describes scavengers of dead bodies, summary executions of prisoners, the endless agonies of wounded comrades, or the assassination of an officer by his men. His letters were accompanied with many cubism drawings [Léger, 1997, p. 11].
Fig. 4. Illustration by Léger on the first page of J’ai tué (private collection).
He was not a war wounded soldier but a neurologically ill patient. During the conflict he suffered from pulmonary tuberculosis, but also from a deep war neurasthenia. Léger seemed to become used to daily war horrors. Nevertheless, the cafard overcame him progressively. He tried to flee the front and asked to be transferred to the military camouflage services where a lot of his friends, such as the painter André Mare (1885–1932), had already been recruited.
Despite continuing efforts, he failed to integrate into these services. Léger’s mental condition worsened and he developed a depressive syndrome. He was evacuated to a Parisian military hospital on August 10th, 1917, and was diagnosed with the following: “rheumatic pain, nervous disorders, depression, pulmonary tuberculosis sequellae and weight loss” (Dossier Fernand Léger; Service des Archives Médicales et Hospitalières des Armées, SAMHA, Limoges, France). The diagnosis of war nervous troubles, more specifically nervous gastritis, was eventually evoked. In December 1917, he was examined by the neurologist Charles Chatelin (1884–1948) at La Salpêtrière hospital in Paris: “He examined me by tapping with a small hammer on my body. He asked me to look in all directions. One of these days, I will need to swallow a very long tube” [Léger, 1997, p. 87]. Léger was admitted to several Parisian military hospitals before his official discharge in May 1918.
The return to civilian life and the improvement of his medical condition marked the beginning of an exceptional artistic collaboration with writer Blaise Cendrars. Léger illustrated the text J’ai tué, published a few days before the armistice and reprinted in 1919 with a portrait of Cendrars (
