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“It isn't up to the painter to define the symbols. Otherwise it would be better if he wrote them out in so many words! The public who look at the picture must interpret the symbols as they understand them.”

Pablo Picasso

Picasso (1937), quote in: William Rowlandson (2007), Reading Lezama's Paradiso. p. 115.
Reply by Picasso when he was asked to explain the symbolism in the Guernica.
1930s

“But there is one very odd thing - to notice that basically a picture doesn't change, that the first 'vision' remains almost intact, in spite of appearances. I often ponder on a light and a dark when I have put them into a painting; I try hard to break them up by interpolating a color that will create a different effect. When the work is photographed, I note that what I put in to correct my first vision has disappeared, and that, after all, the photographic image corresponds with my first vision before the transformation I insisted on.”

Pablo Picasso

Boisgeloup, winter 1934
As quoted in Futurism, ed. Didier Ottinger; Centre Pompidou / 5 Continents Editions, Milan, 2008, p. 313
Quotes, 1930's

“The idea of research has often made painting go astray, and made the artist lose himself in mental lucubrations. Perhaps this has been the principal fault of modern art. The spirit of research has poisoned those who have not fully understood all the positive and conclusive elements in modern art and has made them attempt to paint the invisible and, therefore, the unpaintable.”

Pablo Picasso

As quoted by Marius de Zayas, in 'The Arts', New York, May 1923
1920s, The Arts', New York, May 1923

“Accidents, try to change them - it's impossible. The accidental reveals man.”

Pablo Picasso

Quote in Vogue, 1 November 1956.
1950s

“I do not see why so much importance should be attached to the idea of 'research' in painting.”

Pablo Picasso

Quote in "Picasso", Hans L. C. Jaffe, Thames and Hudson Ltd
Attributed from posthumous publications

“For me, art has neither past nor future. All I have ever made was for the present.”

Pablo Picasso

Quote in "Picasso", Hans L. C. Jaffe, Thames and Hudson Ltd
Attributed from posthumous publications

“I also often hear the word 'evolution'. Repeatedly I am asked to explain how my painting evolved. To me there is no past or future in my art. If a work of art cannot live always in the present it must not be considered at all. The art of the Greeks, of the Egyptians, of the great painters who lived in other times, is not an art of the past; perhaps it is more alive today than it ever was. Art does not evolve by itself, the ideas of people change and with them their mode of expression.”

Pablo Picasso

Paris 1923
As quoted by Marius de Zayas, in 'The Arts', New York, May 1923
Quotes, 1920's, "Picasso Speaks," 1923

“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.”

Pablo Picasso

Quote in "Picasso", Hans L. C. Jaffe, Thames and Hudson Ltd
Attributed from posthumous publications

“When Matisse died, he left me his Odalisques 'as a legacy', he proclaimed.”

Pablo Picasso

after the death of Matisse (1954); as quoted in Matisse & Picasso, By Paul Trachtman, Smithsonian Magazine, February 2003, p. 7
1950s

“I do not believe I have used radically different elements in the different manners I have used in my paintings. If the subjects I have wanted to express have suggested different ways of expression, I have never hesitated to adopt them. I have never made trials nor experiments. Whenever I had something to say I have said it in the manner in which I have felt it ought to be said. Different motives inevitably require different methods of expression.”

Pablo Picasso

Paris 1923
As quoted by Marius de Zayas, in 'The Arts', New York, May 1923
Quotes, 1920's, "Picasso Speaks," 1923

“Academic training in beauty is a sham. We have been deceived… The beauties of the Parthenon, Venuses, Nymphs, Narcissuses are so many lies. Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon.”

Pablo Picasso

1930s, "Conversations avec Picasso," 1934–35
Source: Herschel Browning Chip (1968, p. 271), quoted in Chipp (1978, 266); As cited in: Constance Milbrath (1998), Patterns of Artistic Development in Children, p. 257.

“It is your work in life that is the ultimate seduction.”

Pablo Picasso

“Sex and art are the same thing.”

Pablo Picasso

“Everybody has the same energy potential. The average person wastes his in a dozen little ways. I bring mine to bear on one thing only: my paintings, and everything else is sacrificed to it… myself included.”

Pablo Picasso

“It took me a lifetime.”

Pablo Picasso

“Without great solitude, no serious work is possible.”

Pablo Picasso