"These new means 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 realise 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."

“..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. .”

“The concept of Abstract painting is not a passing abstraction, good only for a few initiates, the total expression of a new generation whose necessities it experiences and to all of whose aspirations it constitutes a response.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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”

“Isn't it human to go beyond the limits, to grow beyond oneself, to strive toward freedom! The round is free.”