Pablo Picasso Quotes
-
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.
-
A painting only lives in the eye of the beholder.
-
The artist spends the first part of his life with the dead, the second with the living, and the third with himself.
-
Art is not made to decorate rooms. It is an offensive weapon in the defense against the enemy.
-
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.
-
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.
-
It's a poor artist who borrows--a good artist steals.
-
"Picasso" is of Italian origin, as you know. And the name a person bears or adopts has its importance.
-
Beauty? To me it is a word without sense because I do not know where its meaning comes from nor where it leads to.
-
The fingerprints of the god who amused himself fashioning them - I can see them on any bone whatsoever.
-
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.
-
Critics, mathematicians, scientists and busybodies want to classify everything, marking the boundaries and limits... In art, there is room for all possibilities.
-
A painter paints to unload himself of feelings and visions.
-
Even if the painting is green, well then! The 'subject' is the green. There is always a subject; it's a joke to suppress the subject, it's impossible.
-
Motivation is in the world around us. We have an infinite amount of material at our disposal, in the lives of those we meet, in what we see and feel, in what we discuss and from the passion of every woman.
-
If I paint a hammer and sickle people may think it is a representation of Communism, but for me it is only a hammer and sickle. I just want to reproduce the objects for what they are, not for what they mean.
-
I am only a public entertainer who understands his time.
-
We must pick out what is good for us where we can find it.
-
What is conserved in the ground? Stone, bronze, ivory, bone, sometimes pottery. Never wood objects, no fabric or skins. That completely skews our notions about primitive man.
-
The earth doesn't have a housekeeper to do the dusting. And the dust that falls on it every day remains there. Everything that's come down to us from the past has been conserved by dust.
-
When you are young and without success, you have only a few friends. Then, later on, when you are rich and famous, you still have a few... if you are lucky.
-
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 the individuality of the artist begins to express itself, what the artist gains in the way of liberty he loses in the way of order.
-
I never calculate. That is why those who do, calculate so much less accurately than I.