Fernand Léger - Art Quotes

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.. 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.

Fernand Léger
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?

Fernand Léger
It is from.... Renaissance that individualism in painting dates; and I do not believe there is any use in looking in this direction if we desire to bring into being a fresh mural art, one that shall be at once popular, collective and contemporary.

Fernand Léger
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.

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
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
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.

Fernand Léger
The time of the often criticized art without real subject [l'art pour l'art] and the art without object [Abstract art] seems to be over. We are experiencing a new return to the meaningful subject, which the common people can understand

Fernand Léger
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..'

Fernand Léger
Let us take the time in this fast and ever-changing life which harasses us and tears us to pieces; to have the strength to remain slow and calm. To work outside the elements of disintegration that surrounds us. To comprehend life in it slow and calm sense. The work of art requires a temperate climate in order to develop fully. In this heightened tempo which is the law of life, to determine fixed points to hold onto them and to slowly work on the achievement of the future

Fernand Léger