Fernand Léger Quotes

At the same time we would most like to run the film back and see how the sanctuaries close again and the lights go out and the great powers of nature are once again met with deserved reverence. One can fell an oak in twenty seconds; but in order to become what it now is, it grew for a century.. ..Progress is but a word without sense, and the cow, which keeps the world alive, will not move faster than three kilometers per hour in the future, either.

Of the various plastic orientations developed over the past twenty-five years, abstract art is the most important, the most interesting.. .It is an extreme state which only a few creators and admirers are capable of achieving. The danger of this formula lies in the very elevation of its intention. Modelings, contrasts, objects have disappeared, leaving only very pure, very precise relations, and a few colors, a few lines; blank spaces, without depth. Add to this a respect for the vertical plane – thin, rigid, sharp. It is a true, incorruptible purism.

The time of the often criticized art without real subject [l'art pour l'art] and the art without object [ Abstract art ] seems to be over. We are experiencing a new return to the meaningful subject, which the common people can understand

..the personification of the close-up detail, the individualisation of the fragment, where the drama takes shape, moves and have it being. Film concurs with this aspect for life. The hand is a multiple, transformable object. Before I saw it in a film, I did not know what a hand was! The object in itself is capable of becoming an absolute, moving, tragic thing.

The relationship of volumes, lines, and colors demands absolute orchestration and order. These values are all unquestionable influential; they have extended into modern objects such as airplanes, automobiles, farm machines, etc. Today we are in competition with the 'beautiful object'; it is undeniable. Sometimes its plastic qualities make it beautiful in itself and consequently unusable; one can only fold one's arms and admire it. There is also today an astonishing art of window display. Certain store windows are highly organized spectacles.. .If, pushing things to extremes, the majority of manufactured objects and 'stored spectacles' were beautiful and had plasticity, we artists would no longer have any reason to exist.

Kunst und Zeugnis, Dora Vallier, Zürich 1967, p. 67

The concept of Abstract painting is not a passing abstraction, good only for a few initiates, [but] the total expression of a new generation whose necessities it experiences and to all of whose aspirations it constitutes a response. (quote, 1920)

..a yellow square, a red and blue avenue, an Eiffel tower with a camouflaged silhouette.. ..that would all be lit up at night, instead of fireworks. [a proposal to Trotsky of a 'polychrome Moscow', for the 1937 exhibition].

From the day that the impressionists liberated painting, the modern picture set out at once the structure itself on contrasts; instead of submitting to a subject, the painter makes an insertion and uses a subject in the service of purely plastic means.. ..[the contemporary painter] must prepare himself in order to confer a maximum of plastic effect on means that have not yet been used. He must not become an imitator of the new visual objectivity, but be a sensibility completely subject to the new state of things.

The earth is round, so why to play it square? Beneath the sun and beneath the moon, in the clouds that sail gently by, everything is going round. Children dance in a ring; there is the Tour de France, and the bikes, and the eyes that look at them and frame them on the road.. .You leave your rectangles, your geometrical windows, and you go to the land of circles in action.. ..It's human nature to break through boundaries, to grow, to push towards freedom. Roundness is free; it has no beginning and no end. [referring to the circus ring]

It's not a country – it's a world. It's impossible to see the limits.. .It's only in Russia that I had a similar impression, but it wasn't the same thing. In America you are confronted with a power in movement with force in reserve without end. An unbelievable vitality - a perpetual movement.

[a new order] ..independent of the values of the feelings, and the description and imitation of nature.. .The value of technique beauty without artistic intention resides in its organism and can be deducted at the same time by its geometric ambitions. I can therefore speak of a new order: the architecture of the technical world. Since the industrial object belongs to the architectonic order, it is assigned an important role in today's artistic creation.

This is the visual world, using the most advanced advertising techniques that are familiar to the crowds in their daily life.. ..What kind of representational art do you want to inflict on these men then, when they’re solicited everyday by the cinema, radio, huge photo montages and advertising hoardings? How can you compete with these enormous modern mechanisms, which give you art to the 1000th degree?

Naturally, in order to find in this break [in the visual perception] with time-honored habits a basis for a new pictorial harmony and a plastic means of dealing with life and movement, there must be an artistic sensibility far in advance of the normal vision of the crowd.

I dispersed my objects in space and got them to hold together by making them radiate forwards, out of the picture. It's all an easy interplay of chords and rhythms made up of foreground and background colours, of conducting lines, of distances and of contrasts.