Fernand Léger - Painting Quotes

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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
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].

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.

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
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
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.

Fernand Léger
From the day that the impressionists liberated painting, the modern picture set out at once the structure itself on contrasts; instead of submitting to a subject, the painter makes an insertion and uses a subject in the service of purely plastic means....[the contemporary painter] must prepare himself in order to confer a maximum of plastic effect on means that have not yet been used. He must not become an imitator of the new visual objectivity, but be a sensibility completely subject to the new state of things.

Fernand Léger
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 necessities it experiences and to all of whose aspirations it constitutes a response.

Fernand Léger