Pablo Picasso Quotes
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All children paint like geniuses. What do we do to them that so quickly dulls this ability?
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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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For me, art has neither past nor future. All I have ever made was for the present.
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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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If I spit, they will take my spit and frame it as great art.
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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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Why do two colors, put one next to the other, sing?
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It means nothing to me. I have no opinion about it, and I don't care.
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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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I do not see why so much importance should be attached to the idea of 'research' in painting.
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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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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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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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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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When there's anything to steal, I steal
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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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I am a communist and my painting is a communist painting. But if I were a shoemaker, Royalist or Communist or anything else, I would not necessarily hammer my shoes in any special way to show my politics.
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When Matisse died, he left me his Odalisques 'as a legacy', he proclaimed.
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Nothing can be accomplished without solitude; I have made a kind of solitude for myself.
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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 sweeps the everyday dust from your soul.
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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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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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Art is a finger up the bourgeoisie ass.