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 appro… - Fernand Léger

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.

There was no telling who this head, or this leg, or that arm, belonged to.. .So I scattered the limbs in my painting and realized that in this way I was getting much closer to the truth than Michelangelo did when he concentrated on every separate muscle.

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]