20 Quotes by Fernand Leger

A modern man registers a hundred times more sensory impressions than an eighteenth-century artist

Man needs colour to live; it's just as necessary an element as fire and water.

Enormous enlargements of an object or a fragment give it a personality it never had before, and in this way, it can become a vehicle of entirely new lyric and plastic power.

What does that represent? There was never any question in plastic art, in poetry, in music, of representing anything. It is a matter of making something beautiful, moving, or dramatic - this is by no means the same thing.

This truth must be recognized as a dogma and assume the validity of an axiom in the general understanding of painting

The realistic value of a work is completely independent of its properties in terms of content.

The feat of superbly imitating a muscle, as Michelangelo did, or a face, as Raphael did, created neither progress nor a hierarchy in art. Because these artists of the sixteenth century imitated human forms, they were not superior to the artists of the high periods of Egyptian, Chaldean, Indochinese, Roman, and Gothic art who interpreted and stylized form but did not imitate it.

Colour is a human need like water and fire. It is a raw material indispensable to life

Even a part of an object has value. A whole new realism resides in the way one envisages an object or one of its parts.