Pablo Picasso Quotes
-
It's a poor artist who borrows--a good artist steals.
-
Imitators? All right! Disciples if you like. But disciples be damned. It's not interesting.
-
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.
-
When there's anything to steal, I steal
-
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)
-
When Matisse died, he left me his Odalisques 'as a legacy', he proclaimed.
-
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.
-
To arrive at abstraction, it is always necessary to begin with a concrete reality.
-
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.
-
Critics, mathematicians, scientists and busybodies want to classify everything, marking the boundaries and limits... In art, there is room for all possibilities.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
There is only one way to see things, until someone shows us how to look at them with different eyes.
-
You must always work not just within but below your means. If you can handle three elements, handle only two. If you can handle ten, then handle only five. In that way the ones you do handle, you handle with more ease, more mastery, and you create a feeling of strength in reserve.
-
The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.
-
Nothing can be done without solitude. I've created my own solitude which nobody suspects.
-
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.
-
To blossom forth, a work of art must ignore or rather forget all the rules.
-
Ah, good taste! What a dreadful thing! Taste is the enemy of creativeness.
-
Variation does not mean evolution. If an artist varies his mode of expression this only means that he has changed his manner of thinking, and in changing, it might be for the better or it might be for the worse.
-
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.
-
The artist spends the first part of his life with the dead, the second with the living, and the third with himself.
-
I have never had time for the idea of searching. Whenever I wanted to express something, I did so without thinking of the past or the future.