FERNAND LEGER, his quotes on painting art, modern life and Cubism / Purism + biography facts of the French painter
Fernand Leger (1908 – 1984), his quotes on painting art of modern life + biography facts. Leger was a famous painter artist in French Cubism; his quotes illustrate his view on Cubism and his shift to clear representational art of Purism. As a modern artist Leger felt very connected with working class people and all techniques in modern times and city life; the main motive of his art.
* At the bottom useful links for more biography information and life facts about the painter Fernand Leger; – the editor, Fons Heijnsbroek.
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Fernand Leger: ‘The Women Cyclists’, 1944 |
Fernand Leger, his quotes on painting art in Cubism / Purism & the modern city
– The impressionists were the first (painters, fh) to reject the absolute value of the subject and to consider its value to be merely relative… …In Paul Cézanne’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.
* artist quotes & notes on Cubism and painting art: ‘Contemporary Achievements in Painting’, Fernand Leger, ‘Soirées de Paris’, Paris 1914; as quoted in “The documents of 20th century art – Functions of Painting by Fernand Leger”, Thames and Hudson Ltd, London 1973, n. p. (French painter in Cubism and Purism painting art; famous for his large representational murals of working class people life in modern city; more biography facts at the bottom)
– 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 id full of diminutives and abbreviations.
* artist quotes & notes on Cubism and painting art: ‘Contemporary Achievements in Painting’, Fernand Leger, ‘Soirées de Paris’, Paris 1914; as quoted in “The documents of 20th century art – Functions of Painting by Fernand Leger”, Thames and Hudson Ltd, London 1973, p. 11.
– 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.
* artist quotes & notes on Cubism and painting art: ‘Contemporary Achievements in Painting’, Fernand Leger, ‘Soirées de Paris’, Paris 1914; as quoted in “The documents of 20th century art – Functions of Painting by Fernand Leger”, Thames and Hudson Ltd, London 1973, p. 12.
– …it (painting, fh) 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.
* artist quotes & notes on Cubism and painting art: ‘Contemporary Achievements in Painting’, Fernand Léger, ‘Soirées de Paris’, Paris 1914; as quoted in “The documents of 20th century art – Functions of Painting by Fernand Leger”, Thames and Hudson Ltd, London 1973, p. 12.
– Naturally, in order to find in this break (in visual perception, fh) with time-honored habits a basis for a new pictorial harmony and a plastic menas of dealing with life and movement, there must be an artistic sensibility far in advance of the normal vision of the crowd.
* artist quotes & notes on Cubism and painting art: ‘Contemporary Achievements in Painting’, Fernand Leger, ‘Soirées de Paris’, Paris 1914; as quoted in “The documents of 20th century art – Functions of Painting by F. Leger”, Thames and Hudson Ltd, London 1973, p. 12.
– 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.
* artist quotes & notes on Cubism and painting art: ‘Contemporary Achievements in Painting’, F. Leger, ‘Soirées de Paris’, Paris 1914; as quoted in “The documents of 20th century art – Functions of Painting by Fernand Leger”, Thames and Hudson Ltd, London 1973, p. 14.
– Contrast = dissonance, and hence a maximum expressive effect. I will take as an example a commonplace subject: the visual effect of curled and round puffs of smoke rising between houses. You want to convey their plastic value.. Here you have the best example on which to apply research into multiplicative intensities. Concentrate your curves with the greatest possible variety without breaking up their mass; frame them by means of the hard, dry relationship of the surfaces of the houses, dead surfaces that will acquire movement by being colored in contrast to the central mass and being opposed by live forms; you will obtain a maximum effect.
* artist quotes & notes on Cubism and painting art: ‘Contemporary Achievements in Painting’, ‘Soirées de Paris’, Paris 1914; as quoted in “The documents of 20th century art – Functions of Painting by Fernand Léger”, Thames and Hudson Ltd, London 1973, p. 16.
– 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. (1920) .
* Fernand Leger, artist quotes & notes on Cubism and painting art: ”Abstract Painting”, Michel Seuphor, Dell Publishing Co., 1964, p. 16.
– This mechanical element, which one is sorry to see disappear from the screen, and which one is impatient to see again, is discreet; it appears only at intervals, and far off, like a spotlight that flashes on in a long, intermittent, harrowing drama of totally uncompromising realism. The plastic event is non-the less there and seems to me be laden with consequences both in itself and for the future. (remark on the filming of Abel Gance’s La Roue, 1922, fh) .
* artist quotes & notes on Cubism and painting art: ”Fernand Leger – The Later Years -”, catalogue ed. Nicolas Serota, published by the Trustees of the Whitechapel Art gallery, London, Prestel Verlag, 1988, p. 21.
– The relationship of volumes, lines, and colors demands absolute orchestration and order. These values are all unquestionable infuential; 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.
* artist quotes & notes on Cubism and painting art: ‘Notes on Contemporary Plastic Life’, Kunstblatt, Berlin 1923; as quoted in “The documents of 20th century art – Functions of Painting by Fernand Léger”, in Thames and Hudson Ltd, London 1973, pp. 24-25.
– Instead of opposing comic and tragic characters (as Molière and Shakespeare, fh) and contrary scenic states, I organize the opposition of contrasting values, lines, and curves. I oppose curves to straight lines, flat surfaces to molded forms, pure local colors to nuances of gray. These initial plastic forms are either superimposed on objective elements or not, it makes no difference to me. There is only a question of variety.
* artist quotes & notes on Cubism and painting art: ‘Notes on Contemporary Plastic Life’, Kunstblatt, Berlin 1923; as quoted in “The documents of 20th century art – Functions of Painting by Fernand Léger”, in Thames and Hudson Ltd, London 1973, p. 25.
-…the personification of the close-up detail, the individualization of the fragment, where the drama takes shape, moves and have it being. Film concurs with this aspect for life. The hand is a multiple, transformable object. Before I saw it in a film, I did not know what a hand was! The object in itself is capable of becoming an absolute, moving, tragic thing.
* artist quotes & notes on Cubism and painting art: ‘L’ésthetique de la Machine – l’Ordre Géometrique et le Vrai -‘, F. Leger, ‘Propos d’Artistes’, 1925.
– I myself have employed the close-up, which is the cinema’s only real invention. The fragment of the object has also been of use to me; by isolating it you personalise it. All this work has led me to regard the phenomenon of objectivity as a new and highly contemporary value in itself. (around 1927, fh) .
* artist quotes & notes on Cubism and painting art: ‘Autour de Ballet Méchanique’, as quoted in ”Fernand Léger – The Later Years -”, catalogue ed. Nicolas Serota, published by the Trustees of the Whitechapel Art gallery, London, Prestel Verlag, 1988, pp. 21-22 (French painter in Cubism and Purism painting art; famous for his large representational murals of working class people life in the modern city
– These new means (in modern film, 1928, fh) 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 realize 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.
* artist quotes & notes on Cubism and painting art: ”Actualités’, Fernand Léger, ‘Varietés’ nr. 1, 1928
– The love of simplicity, precision and clarity, is totally Western. Today’s rational plastic form does not come from the Mediterranean or the Orient; it comes from the North (in France, fh). The North, younger, quicker, less subtle, has seen straight to the heart of the new problem of construction that is posed by modern life.
* artist quotes & notes on Cubism and painting art: ”Actualités’, Fernand Léger, ‘Varietés’ nr. 1, 1928.
– The age we live in is largely – and I think mostly – ‘objective’, but a minority is reacting against this… …My feeling is that I made colour – the colour plane – ‘objective’ in 1918, 1920 and 1921. There is a feeling of objectivity in all the great Primitives – but in ‘the subject’ there is no solution for the object, which has so much intrinsic value that it is ‘’highly explosive’; it destroys all the things around it, unless they have been designed specifically to serve as a setting for it.
* artist quotes & notes on Cubism and painting art: a letter to Simone Herman, September 3, 1933; as quoted in ”Fernand Léger – The Later Years -”, catalogue ed. Nicolas Serota, published by the Trustees of the Whitechapel Art gallery, London, Prestel Verlag, 1988, p. 28.
– The essential is the object. Error consists in forgetting that grain, cotton, wool are vital objects and in being interested in them only because of their value in gold, their speculative value. The economic purpose is not ‘to make millionaires out of gasoline’ but to distribute gasoline according to demand and need. Wall street is an abstraction.
* artist quotes & notes on Cubism and painting art: an exhibition catalogue, John Becker Gallery, New York, March 1933.
– An example: if I compose a picture using as objects a scrap of bark, a scrap of butterfly wing and a purely imaginary form, you probably won’t recognize the bark, or the butterfly wing, and you’ll say: ‘What does this stand for? It is an abstract picture. No it’s a representational picture’… …There is no such thing as ‘abstract’, or ‘concrete’ either. There is a good picture and a bad picture. There is the picture that moves you and the picture that leaves you cold… …A picture has a value in itself, like a musical score, like a poem.
* F. Leger, artist quotes & notes on Cubism and painting art: ”Un Nouveau Realisme, la Couleur Pure et l’Object”, Fernand Leger, Ms 1935.
– The mural artist is concerned with bringing to life dead surfaces by the application of colour. (remark on making large murals, 1937, fh) .
* Fernand Leger, artist quotes & notes on Cubism and painting art: ”Revival of Mural Art”, F. Léger, ‘The Listener’, August 25, 1937 Vol. XVIII. No. 450, pp. 408-409.
– 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. (remark on making murals, fh).
* Fernand Leger, artist quotes & notes on Cubism and painting art: ‘The New Realism goes on’, F. Léger”, ‘Art Front’, February 1937 pp. 7-8.
– …a yellow square, a red and blue avenue, an Eiffel tower with a camouflaged silhouette… …that would all be lit up at night, instead of fireworks. (a proposal to Trotsky of a ‘polychrome Moscow’, for the 1937 exhibition, fh.
* artist quotes & notes on Cubism and painting art: ”Fernand Léger – The Later Years -”, catalogue ed. Nicolas Serota, published by the Trustees of the Whitechapel Art gallery, London, Prestel Verlag, 1988.
– 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. Modellings, 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.
* artist quotes & notes on Cubism and painting art: a publication on abstract art by Fernand Léger, Montreal, 1945; as quoted in ”Abstract Painting”, Michel Seuphor, Dell Publishing Co., 1964.
– It is a true, incorruptible purism… …It is a religion that cannot be argued about. It has its saints, its disciples and its heretics. Modern life with its speed und tumult, dynamic and full of contrasts, beats furiously against this light, luminous, delicate structure, which emerges coldly from the chaos. Do not touch it, it is an accomplished fact. It had to be, it is there to stay. (1945) .
* Fernand Leger, artist quotes & notes on Cubism and painting art: ”Abstract Painting”, Michel Seuphor, Dell Publishing Co., 1964, p. 33.
– It’s not a country – it’s a world. It’s impossible to see the limits… …It’s only in Russia that I had a similar impression, but it wasn’t the same thing. In America you are confronted with a power in movement with force in reserve without end. An unbelievable vitality – a perpetual movement.
* Fernand Leger, artist quotes & notes on Cubism and painting art: ”Letter from France”, F. Léger , Vol. 84, No 4, April 1946, pp. 46-62.
– 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, both Purism artists, fh) 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. (critic on the conception of ‘social realist art’, around 1949, fh).
* artist quotes & notes on Cubism and painting art: ”Fernand Léger – The Later Years -”, catalogue ed. Nicolas Serota, published by the Trustees of the Whitechapel Art gallery, London, Prestel Verlag, 1988, p. 57.
– 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 photomontages and advertising hoardings? How can you compete with these enormous modern mechanisms, which give you art to the 1000th degree? (remark around 1950, on the modern world of billboards and neon light, fh) .
* artist quotes & notes on Cubism and painting art: ”Fernand Leger – The Later Years -”, catalogue ed. Nicolas Serota, published by the Trustees of the Whitechapel Art gallery, London, Prestel Verlag, 1988, p. 58.
– 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. (remark on the Circus, 1950, fh) .
* artist quotes & notes on Cubism and painting art: ”Fernand Leger – The Later Years -”, catalogue ed. Nicolas Serota, published by the Trustees of the Whitechapel Art gallery, London, Prestel Verlag, 1988, p. 15.
-… between ourselves, do you think a worker wants to hang a picture in his home where he sees himself sweating in a factory? He would prefer a bouquet of flowers or a pretty landscape. (his critic on Aragon’s social realism, around 1950, fh) .
* artist quotes & notes on Cubism and painting art: ”Fernand Léger – The Later Years -”, catalogue ed. Nicolas Serota, published by the Trustees of the Whitechapel Art gallery, London, Prestel Verlag, 1988, p. 67.
– Isn’t it human to go beyond the limits, to grow beyond oneself, to strive toward freedom! The round is free. (remark on the Circus, 1950, fh) .
* Fernand Leger, artist quotes & notes on Cubism and painting art: ”Fernand Léger – The Later Years -”, catalogue ed. Nicolas Serota, published by the Trustees of the Whitechapel Art gallery, London, Prestel Verlag, 1988, p. 17.
– The earth is round, so why to play it square? Beneath the sun and beneath the moon, in the clouds that sail gently by, everything is going round. Children dance in a ring; there is the Tour de France, and the bikes, and the eyes that look at them and frame them on the road… …You leave your rectangles, your geometrical windows, and you go to the land of circles in action… …It’s human nature to break through boundaries, to grow, to push towards freedom. Roundness is free; it has no beginning and no end. (remark on the Circus, 1950, fh).
* artist quotes & notes on Cubism and painting art: ”Fernand Léger – The Later Years -”, catalogue ed. Nicolas Serota, published by the Trustees of the Whitechapel Art gallery, London, Prestel Verlag, 1988, p. 41 (French painter in Cubism and Purism painting art; famous for his large representational murals of working class people life in modern city; more biography facts at the bottom)
– 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 (text in his painting ‘Les mains’ – hommage a Majakovski’ 1951 (Russian Futurist poet, fh) .
* artist quotes & notes on Cubism and painting art: ”Fernand Léger – The Later Years -”, catalogue ed. Nicolas Serota, published by the Trustees of the Whitechapel Art gallery, London, Prestel Verlag, 1988, p. 68.
– 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. (remark on his painting ‘La Joconde aux Clés’). .
* artist quotes & notes on Cubism and painting art: ‘La vie fait de l’Oeuvre de Fernand Léger’, Dora Vallier, ‘Cahiers d’Art’, 2, 1954, p. 153.
– 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.
* artist quotes & notes on Cubism and painting art: exhibition catalogue Fernand Leger, Paris, 1956 (French painter in Cubism and Purism painting art; famous for his murals of working class people life in modern city)
– 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 Leger, artist quotes & notes on Cubism and painting art: ”Bekentnisse und Gespräche, F. Léger”, André Verdet, Zürich 1957 pp. 32-33.
– 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.
* artist quotes & notes on Cubism and painting art: ”Fernand Léger – The Later Years -”, catalogue ed. Nicolas Serota, published by the Trustees of the Whitechapel Art gallery, London, Prestel Verlag, 1988, p. 12.
– I was attracted to Romanesque sculptures, to the complete re-invented figures and the freedom with which the Romanesque artist constructed them. He does not copy, he creates in a totally anti-Renaissance fashion can say that in Romanesque sculpture I have found a starting point for distortion.
* Fernand Leger, artist quotes & notes on Cubism and painting art: ”Kunst und Zeugnis”, Dora Vallier, Zürich 1967, p. 67.
– 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 (both were French painters around 1800, fh). That was my way, and it touched me, instantly.
* Fernand Leger, artist quotes & notes on Cubism and painting art: ”Kunst und Zeugnis”, Dora Vallier, Zürich 1967, p. 68.
– 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.
* artist quotes & notes on Cubism and painting art: ”Fernand Leger – Das Figürliche Werk”, exhibition catalogue, Köln, 1978, p. 52.
– 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.
* artist quotes & notes on Cubism and painting art: ‘Legér and America’, exhibition catalogue ”Fernand Leger”, Buffalo 1982, p. 52.
– I dispersed my objects in space and got them to hold together by making them radiate forwards, out of the picture. It’s all an easy interplay of chords and rhythms made up of foreground and background colours, of conducting lines, of distances and of contrasts.
* artist quotes & notes on Cubism and painting art: exhibition catalogue ”Fernand Léger”, Paris 1972, p. 91.
Fernand Leger; unsourced artist quotes by the French painter in Cubism / Purism
– A work of art must be significant in its own time like any other intellectual manifestation… …because it’s visual… …it is a reflection of external conditions not psychological ones. Every painting must allow for this momentary and eternal value which will make it last beyond the period of its creation. (artist quote on an artwork as a sign of the time, by Fernand Leger)
Links for more information on the French artist, Fernand Leger
* biography facts of the French Cubist / Purist artist Fernand Léger,on Wikipedia
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