Pablo Picasso Quotes
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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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The fingerprints of the god who amused himself fashioning them - I can see them on any bone whatsoever.
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We must pick out what is good for us where we can find it.
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To arrive at abstraction, it is always necessary to begin with a concrete reality.
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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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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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I don't know in advance what I am going to put on canvas any more than I decide beforehand what colours I am going to use.
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The artist spends the first part of his life with the dead, the second with the living, and the third with himself.
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The painter goes through states of fullness and evaluation. That is the whole secret of 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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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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A painting only lives in the eye of the beholder.
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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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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.
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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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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.
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I am only a public entertainer who understands his time.
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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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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.
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It's a poor artist who borrows--a good artist steals.
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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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Beauty? To me it is a word without sense because I do not know where its meaning comes from nor where it leads to.
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Critics, mathematicians, scientists and busybodies want to classify everything, marking the boundaries and limits... In art, there is room for all possibilities.
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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.