Fernand Léger Quotes

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.

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]

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.

The compression of the modern picture, its variety, its breaking up of forms.. .It is certain that the evolution of the means of locomotion and their speed have a great deal to do with the new way of seeing. Many superficial people raise the cry 'anarchy' in front of these pictures because they cannot follow the whole evolution of contemporary life that painting records.

..between ourselves, do you think a worker wants to hang a picture in his home where he sees himself sweating in a factory? He would prefer a bouquet of flowers or a pretty landscape. [Leger's critic on Aragon's Social Realism ]

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.

This mechanical element, which one is sorry to see disappear from the screen, and which one is impatient to see again, is discreet; it appears only at intervals, and far off, like a spotlight that flashes on in a long, intermittent, harrowing drama of totally uncompromising realism. The plastic event is non-the less there and seems to me be laden with consequences both in itself and for the future. [on the filming of Abel Gance's La Roue, 1922]

They are not like the – patron’s hands or the – blessing hands of the curate – They resemble their tools, mountains, tree trunks.. .The time is approaching when machines will – work FOR them – Then he will have hands like his boss – WHY NOT? – He's on the way – HIS LIFE begins TODAY [written text in his painting 'Les mains – hommage a Majakovski', 1951 - [ Vladimir Mayakovsky was a Russian Futurist poet].

Quote in Un Nouveau Realisme, la Couleur Pure et l'Object, Fernand Léger, Ms 1935

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.

In 1942 when I was in New York, I was struck by the neon advertisements flashing all over Broadway. You are there, you talk to someone, and all of a sudden he turns blue. Then the colour fades - another one comes and turns him red or yellow. The colour – the colour of neon advertising is free; it exists in space. I wanted to do the same in my canvases.

The love of simplicity, precision and clarity, is totally Western. Today's rational plastic form does not come from the Mediterranean or the Orient; it comes from the North [of France]. The North, younger, quicker less subtle, has seen straight to the heart of the new problem of construction that is posed by modern life.

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

I was attracted to Romanesque sculptures, to the complete re-invented figures and the freedom with which the Romanesque artist constructed them. He does not copy, he creates in a totally anti-Renaissance fashion can say that in Romanesque sculpture I have found a starting point for distortion.

It is an outrage towards the masses.. ..It's wanting to treat them as though they're incapable of raising themselves up to this new realism [promoted by Léger and Le Corbusier ] which is that of their area, which they've made with their hands.. .To want to say to these men 'the modern is not for you it's an art for the rich bourgeoisie..' [attack on the notion of Social Realism art]