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 ne… - Fernand Léger

..it [painting art] has never been so truly realistic, so firmly attached to its own period as it is today. A kind of painting that is realistic in the highest sense is beginning to appear, and it is here today.. .The advertising billboard, dictated by modern commercial needs, that brutally cuts across a landscape.. ..this yellow or red poster shouting in a timid landscape, is the best of possible reasons for the new painting; it topples the whole sentimental literary concept and announces the advent of plastic contrast.

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.

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.