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?"

"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. [on the filming of Abel Gances La Roue, 1922]"

"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 wont recognise the bark, or the butterfly wing, and youll say: What does this stand for? It is an abstract picture. No its 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."

"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. (quote, 1920)"

"I myself have employed the close-up, which is the cinemas only real invention. The fragment of the object has also been of use to me; by isolating it you personalize it. All this work has led me to regard the phenomenon of objectivity as a new and highly contemporary value in itself [quote of c. 1927]."

"Instead of opposing comic and tragic characters [as Molière and Shakespeare] 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."

"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 ones 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."

"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."

"..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]."

"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."

"Its not a country – its a world. Its impossible to see the limits.. .Its only in Russia that I had a similar impression, but it wasnt 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."

"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."