Fernand Léger Quotes

40 Sourced Quotes

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 -

Fernand Léger
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.

Fernand Léger
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.

Fernand Léger
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.

Fernand Léger
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.'

Fernand Léger
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.

Fernand Léger
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.

Fernand Léger
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.

Fernand Léger
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'].

Fernand Léger
On the Circus:
Isn't it human to go beyond the limits, to grow beyond oneself, to strive toward freedom! The round is free.

Fernand Léger