Pablo Picasso Quotes
-
To blossom forth, a work of art must ignore or rather forget all the rules.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Imitators? All right! Disciples if you like. But disciples be damned. It's not interesting.
-
For a long time I limited myself to one colour - as a form of discipline.
-
The only thing that's important is the legend created by the picture, and not whether it continues to exist itself.
-
The painter goes through states of fullness and evaluation. That is the whole secret of art.
-
The quality of a painter depends on the amount of past he carries with him.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Good designers copy; great designers steal.
-
Have you noticed that bones are always modeled and not carved, that you always have the impression they come from a mold, that they were first modeled in clay? Any bone you look at, you always find fingerprints on it.
-
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.
-
It's a poor artist who borrows--a good artist steals.
-
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.
-
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
-
To arrive at abstraction, it is always necessary to begin with a concrete reality.
-
A painting only lives in the eye of the beholder.
-
Critics, mathematicians, scientists and busybodies want to classify everything, marking the boundaries and limits... In art, there is room for all possibilities.
-
I have never made radically different experiments. Whenever I wanted to say something, I said it the way I believed I should.
-
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.
-
It was thinking about Casagemas's death that started me painting in blue.