Fernand Léger - Time Quotes

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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
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.

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
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
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
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