Le Plan de l’aiguille

Having arrived in Paris in 1910, Moïse Kisling soon met Cendrars. “In those days, painters and writers were much the same. We lived intermingled, probably sharing the same concerns; one might even say each writer had his own painter,” Cendrars later said. Though Kisling was not “his” painter, the war would make him one of Cendrars’s closest friends. When the conflict broke out, Kisling, a foreigner like Cendrars, enlisted in the Foreign Legion; like his comrade-in-arms, he was seriously wounded at the Ferme de Navarin during the great Champagne offensive. Blaise Cendrars, who lost his right hand in the same battle, then wrote La Guerre au Luxembourg, which Kisling illustrated in 1916.