Pablo Picasso Quotes
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A painting only lives in the eye of the beholder.
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For a long time I limited myself to one colour - as a form of discipline.
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The only thing that's important is the legend created by the picture, and not whether it continues to exist itself.
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Why do two colors, put one next to the other, sing?
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The painter goes through states of fullness and evaluation. That is the whole secret of art.
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Art sweeps the everyday dust from your soul.
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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.
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I would like to manage to prevent people from ever seeing how a picture of mine has been done. What can it possibly matter? What I want is that the only thing emanating from my pictures should be emotion. Boisgeloup, winter 1934.
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Matisse makes a drawing, then he makes a copy of it. He recopies it five times, ten times, always clarifying the line. He's convinced that the last, the most stripped down, is the best, the purest, the definitive one; and in fact, most of the time, it was the first. In drawing, nothing is better than the first attempt.
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Everyone wants to understand art. Why don't we try to understand the song of a bird? Why do we love the night, the flowers, everything around us, without trying to understand them? But in the case of a painting, people think they have to understand.
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The quality of a painter depends on the amount of past he carries with 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 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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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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He was an Afghan Hound name Kabul. Since him I have had other Afghan Hounds.... Perhaps I am looking for his ghost. He is the only one that I sometimes think about. Often, if he comes in to my mind when I am working, it alters what I do. The nose on the face I am drawing gets longer and sharper. The hair of the woman I am sketching gets longer and fluffy, resting against her cheeks like his ears rested against his head.
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To arrive at abstraction, it is always necessary to begin with a concrete reality.
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It's a poor artist who borrows--a good artist steals.
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When Matisse died, he left me his Odalisques 'as a legacy', he proclaimed.
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It was thinking about Casagemas's death that started me painting in blue.
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I treat paintings as I treat objects. If a window in a picture looks wrong, I close it and draw the curtains, just as I would do in my own room.
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Almost every evening, either I went to [Georges] 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 work. A canvas wasn't finished unless both of us felt it was.
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"Picasso" is of Italian origin, as you know. And the name a person bears or adopts has its importance.
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Art is not chaste. Those ill prepared should be allowed no contact with art. Art is dangerous. If it is chaste, it is not art.
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Forcing yourself to use restricted means is the sort of restraint that liberates invention. It obliges you to make a kind of progress that you can't even imagine in advance.