Pablo Picasso Quotes
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In the end there is only Matisse.
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You cannot go against nature. She is stronger than the strongest of men. We can permit ourselves some liberties, but in details only.
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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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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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I am always making that what I am not capable, in an attempt to learn how to doing it.
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When German soldiers used to come to my studio and look at my pictures of Guernica, they'd ask 'Did you do this?'. And I'd say, 'No, you did.'
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To blossom forth, a work of art must ignore or rather forget all the rules.
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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 means nothing to me. I have no opinion about it, and I don't care.
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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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If you are a genius and unsuccessful, everybody treats you as if you were a genius, but when you come to be successful, when you commence to earn money, when you are really successful, then your family and everybody no longer treats you like a genius, they treat you like a man who has become successful.
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I always forbade everyone to clean my studios, dust them, not only for fear they would disturb my things, but especially because I always counted on the protection of dust. It's my ally. I always let it settle where it likes. It's like a layer of protection.
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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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Art is a finger up the bourgeoisie ass.
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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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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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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.
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Good designers copy; great designers steal.
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When Matisse died, he left me his Odalisques 'as a legacy', he proclaimed.
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Art is not made to decorate rooms. It is an offensive weapon in the defense against the enemy.
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Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist while still achieving milestones and outcomes as required by certain funders and policy-makers.
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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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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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Age only matters when one is aging. Now that I have arrived at a great age, I might as well be twenty.