Pablo Picasso Quotes
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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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When Matisse died, he left me his Odalisques 'as a legacy', he proclaimed.
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When I was a kid I drew like Michelangelo. It took me years to learn to draw like a kid.
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Their forms had no more influence on me than they did on Matisse. Or Derain. But for them, the masks were sculptures like all others. When Matisse showed me his first African head, he spoke to me of Egyptian art.
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And from the point of view of art there are no concrete or abstract forms, but only forms which are more or less convincing lies. That those lies are necessary to our mental selves is beyond any doubt, as it is through them that we form our aesthetic point of view of life. (Paris 1923)
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I who have been involved with all styles of painting can assure you that the only things that fluctuate are the waves of fashion which carry the snobs and speculators; the number of true connoisseurs remains more or less the same.
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Why do two colors, put one next to the other, sing?
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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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We must pick out what is good for us where we can find it.
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Because I cannot work except in solitude, it is necessary that I live my work and that is impossible except in solitude.
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You know, it's just like being a peddler. You want two breasts? Well, here you are -- two breasts. We must see to it that the man looking at the picture has at hand everything he needs to paint a nude. If you really give him everything he needs -- and the best -- he'll put everything where it belongs, with his own eyes. Each person will make for himself the kind of nude he wants, with the nude that I will have made for him.
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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 there's anything to steal, I steal
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The quality of a painter depends on the amount of past he carries with him.
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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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What I have to do is utilize as best I can the ideas which objects suggest to me, connect, fuse, and color in my way the shadows they cast within me, illumine them from the inside. And since of necessity my vision is quite different from that of the next man, my painting will interpret things in an entirely different manner even though it makes use of the same elements.
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A painter paints to unload himself of feelings and visions.
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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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It is the object which aroused the artist, stimulated his ideas and set of his emotions. These ideas and emotions will be imprisoned in his work for good.
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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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When art critics get together they talk about Form and Structure and Meaning. When artists get together they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine.
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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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Style is besides the point. Nobody would pay attention if one always said the same thing, in the same words and the same tone of voice.
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I have never made radically different experiments. Whenever I wanted to say something, I said it the way I believed I should.