Tuberculosis cut La Fresnaye's career in half. He contracted the disease while serving in the French army during the First World War, was discharged in 1918, and spent his remaining years in the south of France, gradually abandoning the Cubism that had made his name and advocating instead for traditional realism. He died in 1925, at forty.

He was born in Le Mans in 1885 into an aristocratic family with an ancestral chateau in Falaise. He studied at the Academie Julian, the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and the Ranson Academy under Maurice Denis, moving from Symbolism to Cubism around 1910. He joined the Section d'Or group in 1912, exhibiting alongside Duchamp, Gleizes and Metzinger at Jacques Villon's studio.

His Cubism was always temperate. He never fully embraced the radical fragmentation of Braque and Picasso, retaining naturalistic colour and recognisable forms that helped popularise the movement without terrifying bourgeois audiences. The restraint was both a strength and a limitation: it made his work accessible, but it meant that the avant-garde moved past him before the war intervened. His colour remained lyrical and warm where analytical Cubism was grey and cerebral. He came from aristocratic stock, painted with aristocratic moderation, and died too young to see whether the moderation would have held.