Fernand Léger Quotes

I wanted to proclaim a return to simplicity by ways of an immediate art without any subtlety, comprehensible to all. I love Louis David, because he is so anti-impressionist.. .I love the dryness in his work and also in that of Ingres. That was my way, and it touched me, instantly.

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.

When one crosses a landscape by automobile or express train, it becomes fragmented; it loses in descriptive value but gains in synthetic value. The view through the door of the railroad car or the automobile windshield, in combination with the speed, has altered the habitual look of things. A modern man registers a hundred times more sensory impressions than an eighteenth-century artist; so much so that our language, for example is full of diminutives and abbreviations.

Instead of opposing comic and tragic characters [as Molière and Shakespeare] and contrary scenic states, I organize the opposition of contrasting values, lines, and curves. I oppose curves to straight lines, flat surfaces to molded forms, pure local colors to nuances of gray. These initial plastic forms are either superimposed on objective elements or not, it makes no difference to me. There is only a question of variety.

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

One day I had painted a bunch of keys on a canvas, my bunch of keys. I didn't know what to put next to them. I needed something that would be the absolute opposite of a bunch of keys. So when I finished work I went out. I had only walked a few yard when what should I see in a shop windows? A postcard of the Mona Lisa! At once I knew that was what I needed; what could have made a greater contrast to the keys?. ..Then I also added a can of sardines. It was such a strong contrast. [on his painting 'La Joconde aux Clés'].

It is a true, incorruptible purism.. .It is a religion that cannot be argued about. It has its saints, its disciples and its heretics. Modern life with its speed and tumult, dynamic and full of contrasts, beats furiously against this light, luminous, delicate structure, which emerges coldly from the chaos. Do not touch it, it is an accomplished fact. It had to be, it is there to stay. [quote, 1945]

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?

These new means [in the modern film, 1920's] have given us a new mentality. We want to see clearly, we want to understand mechanisms, functions, motors, down to their subtlest details. Composite wholes are no longer enough for us – we want to feel and grasp the details of those wholes – and we realise that these details, these fragments, if seen in isolation, have a complete and particular life of their own.. .Close-ups in the cinema are a consecration of this new vision.. .A shoe as beautiful as a picture. A picture as beautiful as an X-ray machine.

I venture out to the great 'sujet'; but, I repeat, my painting always remains object painting; it starts around 1936 with 'Adam et Eve'. My figures humanise themselves further, but I always stick to the pictorial circumstance – no eloquence, no romanticism -

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.

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.

Quote from: 'Actualités, Fernand Léger', in 'Varietés nr. 1', 1928, pp. 523-524

The Impressionists were the first [painters] to reject the absolute value of the subject and to consider its value to be merely relative.. .In Paul Cezanne's letters I notice ideas like these: 'Objects must turn, recede, and live. I wish to make something lasting from impressionism, like the art in the museums'.. ..'For an impressionist, to paint after nature is not to paint the object, but to express sensations'.. ..'After having looked at the old masters, one must take haste to leave them and to verify in one's self the instincts, the sensations that dwell in us.'