Pablo Picasso Quotes
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And fame, for a painter means sales, gains, fortune, riches. And today, as you know, I am celebrated. I am rich.
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It is my misfortune - and probably my delight - to use things as my passions tell me. What a miserable fate for a painter who adores blondes to have to stop himself putting them into a picture because they don't go with the basket of fruit! . . . I put all the things I like into my pictures. The things - so much the worse for them. They just have to put up with it.
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In the old days pictures went forward toward completion by stages. Every day brought something new. A picture used to be a sum of additions. In my case a picture is a sum of destructions. I do a picture - then I destroy it. In the end though, nothing is lost: the red I took away from one place turns up somewhere else
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As far as I am concerned, a painting speaks for itself. What is the use of giving explanations, when all is said and done? A painter has only one language.
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Age only matters when one is aging. Now that I have arrived at a great age, I might as well be twenty.
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Whether he wants it or not, man is the instrument of nature; she imposes on him character and appearance.
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Nothing can be accomplished without solitude; I have made a kind of solitude for myself.
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When it comes right down to it, all you have is your self. Your Self is a sun with a thousand rays.
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Today, as you know, I am famous and very rich. But when I am alone with myself, I haven't the 'courage' to consider myself an artist, in the great and ancient sense of that word... I am only a public entertainer, who understands his age.
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Two of the most frustrated trades are dentists and photographers - dentists because they want to be doctors, and photographers because they want to be painters.
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Mathematics, trigonometry, chemistry, psychoanalysis, music, and what not have been related to cubism to give it an easier interpretation. All this has been pure literature, not to say nonsense, which brought bad results, blinding people with theories. Cubism has kept itself within the limits and limitations of painting, never pretending to go beyond it.
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When you start with a portrait and search for a pure form, a clear volume, through successive eliminations, you arrive inevitably at the egg. Likewise, starting with the egg and following the same process in reverse, one finishes with the portrait.
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Art is a finger up the bourgeoisie ass.
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Almost every evening in their common early-Cubist years, in Paris, either I went to Braque's studio or Braque came to mine. Each of us had to see what the other had done during the day. We criticized each other's paintings. A canvas wasn't finished unless both of us felt it was. a remark of Picasso to Françoise Gilot, December 1908
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It means nothing to me. I have no opinion about it, and I don't care.
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I do not see why so much importance should be attached to the idea of 'research' in painting.
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Picasso was telling Madame C- that he could paint anywhere and anyhow. That nothing in the world could stop him. That even if he were imprisoned, he would draw on the dust-covered prison walls and on the floor, with his fingers dripped in his own spit. He said he could paint then and there if he wanted to, or if he felt like it.
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Now there is fame! Of all - hunger, misery, the incomprehension by the public - fame is by far the worst. It is the castigation of God by the artist. It is sad. It is true.
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When there's anything to steal, I steal
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Imitators? All right! Disciples if you like. But disciples be damned. It's not interesting.
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Good designers copy; great designers steal.
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Why should I copy this owl, this sea urchin? Why should I try to imitate nature? I might just as well try to trace a perfect circle.
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If I had known there was such a thing as Islamic Calligraphy, I would never have started to paint. I have strived to reach the highest levels of artistic mastery, but I found that Islamic Calligraphy was there ages before I was.
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Style is often something which locks the painter into the same vision, the same technique, the same formula during years and years, sometimes during one's whole lifetime.