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Pablo Picasso Quotes
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Pablo Ruiz Picasso was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, stage designer, poet and playwright who spent most of his adult life in France. Regarded as one of the most influential artists of the 20th century, he is known for co-founding the Cubist movement, the invention of constructed sculpture, the co-invention of collage, and for the wide variety of styles that he helped develop and explore. Among his most famous works are the proto-Cubist Les Demoiselles d'Avignon , and Guernica , a dramatic portrayal of the bombing of Guernica by the German and Italian airforces during the Spanish Civil War.

Picasso demonstrated extraordinary artistic talent in his early years, painting in a naturalistic manner through his childhood and adolescence. During the first decade of the 20th century, his style changed as he experimented with different theories, techniques, and ideas. After 1906, the Fauvist work of the slightly older artist Henri Matisse motivated Picasso to explore more radical styles, beginning a fruitful rivalry between the two artists, who subsequently were often paired by critics as the leaders of modern art.Picasso's work is often categorized into periods. While the names of many of his later periods are debated, the most commonly accepted periods in his work are the Blue Period , the Rose Period , the African-influenced Period , Analytic Cubism , and Synthetic Cubism , also referred to as the Crystal period. Much of Picasso's work of the late 1910s and early 1920s is in a neoclassical style, and his work in the mid-1920s often has characteristics of Surrealism. His later work often combines elements of his earlier styles.

Exceptionally prolific throughout the course of his long life, Picasso achieved universal renown and immense fortune for his revolutionary artistic accomplishments, and became one of the best-known figures in 20th-century art. Wikipedia  

✵ 25. October 1881 – 8. April 1973
Pablo Picasso photo
Pablo Picasso: 128   quotes 232   likes

Pablo Picasso Quotes

“Sex and art are the same thing.”

Pablo Picasso
Art , Sex

“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.

Beauty , Art , Training

“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

Way , Motivation , Painting

“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 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

Drawing , Painting

“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

People , Art , Idea , Change

“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

Art , Past , Future

“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

Idea , Painting

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

Pablo Picasso

Quote in Vogue, 1 November 1956.
1950s

Change

“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

Art , Idea , Painting

“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

Color , Light , Appearance , Winter

“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

Understanding

“Nothing can be accomplished without solitude; I have made a kind of solitude for myself.”

Pablo Picasso

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

Solitude

“When we did Cubist paintings [Picasso and Georges Braque, in their early Cubist period in Paris], our intention was not to produce Cubist paintings but to express what was within us. No one laid down a course of action for us, and our friends the poets [a. o. Appolinaire and Cendral] followed our endeavor attentively but they never dictated it to us.”

Pablo Picasso

Boisgeloup, winter 1934
Quote of Picasso in Futurism, ed. Didier Ottinger; Centre Pompidou / 5 Continents Editions, Milan, 2008
Quotes, 1930's, "Conversations avec Picasso," 1934–35

Winter , Painting

“When I hear people speak of the evolution of an artist, it seems to me that they are considering him standing between two mirrors that face each other and reproduce his image an infinite number of times, and that they contemplate the successive images of one mirror as his past, and the images of the other mirror as his future, while his real image is taken as his present. They do not consider that they all are the same images in different planes…”

Pablo Picasso

Paris 1923
As quoted in Futurism, ed. Didier Ottinger; Centre Pompidou / 5 Continents Editions, Milan, 2008, p. 311
Quotes, 1920's

People , Time , Success , Past

“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.”

Pablo Picasso

a remark of Picasso to Françoise Gilot, December 1948
Quote of Picasso, in Futurism, ed. Didier Ottinger; Centre Pompidou / 5 Continents Editions, Milan, 2008, p. 311
Quotes, 1940's

Painting

“You don't need to show them to me [the notes of the complete interview which Christian Zervos], editor of 'Cahiers d'Art' showed Picasso after their conversations at Boisgeloup: Picasso's country place then]. The essential thing in our period of weak morale is to create enthusiasm. How many people have actually read Homer? All the same the whole world talks of him. In this way the Homeric legend is created. A legend in this sense provokes a valuable stimulus. Enthusiasm is what we need most, we and the younger generation.”

Pablo Picasso

Boisgeloup, 1935
As quoted in Futurism, ed. Didier Ottinger; Centre Pompidou / 5 Continents Editions, Milan, 2008
Quotes, 1930's, "Conversations avec Picasso," 1934–35

People , World , Way , Sense

“It is my misfortune - and probably my delight - to use things as my passions tell me. What a miserable fate for a painter who adores blondes to have to stop himself putting them into a picture because they don't go with the basket of fruit!”

Pablo Picasso

Herschel Browning Chip (1968, p. 267).
(another and longer version:) What a sad fate for a painter who loves blondes, but who refrains from putting them in his picture because they don’t go with the basket of fruit! What misery for a painter who hates apples to be obliged to use them all the time because they go with the cloth! I put everything I love in my paintings. So much the worse for the things, they have only to arrange themselves with one another
Richard Friendenthal (1963, p. 256).
1930s, "Conversations avec Picasso," 1934–35

Fate , Passion

“…this bull is a bull and this horse is a horse… If you give a meaning to certain things in my paintings it may be very true, but it is not my idea to give this meaning. What ideas and conclusions you have got I obtained too, but instinctively, unconsciously. I make the painting for the painting. I paint the objects for what they are.”

Pablo Picasso

Quoted in: Paul Jones (2011), The Sociology of Architecture: Constructing Identities. p. 47.
Other explanation by Picasso of the Guernica.
Quotes, 1930's

Idea , Horse , Painting

“Everyone wants to understand painting. Why don't they try to understand the song of the birds? Why do they love a night, a flower, everything which surrounds man, without attempting to understand them? Whereas where painting is concerned, they want to understand. Let them understand above all that the artist works from necessity; that he, too, is a minute element of the world to whom one should ascribe no more importance than so many things in nature which charm us but which we do not explain to ourselves. Those who attempt to explain a picture are on the wrong track most of the time. Gertrude Stein, overjoyed, told me some time ago that she had finally understood what my picture represented: three musicians. It was a still life!!”

Pablo Picasso

Boisgeloup, winter 1934
As quoted in Futurism, ed. Didier Ottinger; Centre Pompidou / 5 Continents Editions, Milan, 2008
Quotes, 1930's, "Conversations avec Picasso," 1934–35

Love , Life , World , Flowers

“Mathematics, trigonometry, chemistry, psychoanalysis, music, and what not have been related to cubism to give it an easier interpretation. All this has been pure literature, not to say nonsense, which brought bad results, blinding people with theories. Cubism has kept itself within the limits and limitations of painting, never pretending to go beyond it.”

Pablo Picasso

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

People , Music , Literature , Mathematics

“It is not what the artist does that counts. But what he is. Cézanne would never have interested me if he had lived and thought like Jaques-Emile Blanche, even if the apple he had painted had been ten times more beautiful. What interests us is the anxiety of Cézanne, the teaching of Cézanne, the anguish of Van Gogh, in short the inner drama of the man. The rest is false.”

Pablo Picasso

Boisgeloup, winter 1934
Richard Friedenthal, (1963, p. 259)
Quotes, 1930's, "Conversations avec Picasso," 1934–35

Beauty , Winter , Time , Painting

“It would be very curious to record by means of photographs, not the stage of the picture, but its metamorphoses. Perhaps one would perceive the path taken by the mind in order to put its dreams into a concrete form. But what is really very curious is to observe that fundamentally the picture does not change, that despite appearances the initial vision remains almost intact”

Pablo Picasso

Boisgeloup, winter 1934
Richard Friedenthal, (1963, p. 256).
Quotes, 1930's, "Conversations avec Picasso," 1934–35

Dreams , Appearance , Winter , Change

“You have got to be able to picture side by side everything Matisse and I were doing at that time. No one has ever looked at Matisse's painting more carefully than I; and no one has looked at mine more carefully than he.”

Pablo Picasso

Quote by old Picasso (1960's); as quoted in 'Matisse & Picasso', Paul Trachtman, Smithsonian Magazine, February 2003, p 1
1960s

Time , Painting

“I deal with painting as I deal with things, I paint a window just as I look out of a window. If an open window looks wrong in a picture, I draw the curtain and shut it, just as I would in my own room. In painting, as in life, you must act directly.”

Pablo Picasso

Herschel Browning Chip (1968, p. 271).
1930s, "Conversations avec Picasso," 1934–35

Life , Drawing , Painting

“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.”

Pablo Picasso

Andre Malraux cites Picasso in: Anatoliĭ Podoksik, ‎Marina Aleksandrovna Bessonova, ‎Pablo Picasso (1989), Picasso: The Artists Work in Soviet Museums. p. 13.
Picasso talking about his discovery of African art.
Attributed from posthumous publications

Art

“The painter goes through states of fullness and evacuation. That is the whole secret of art. I go for a walk in the forest of Fontainebleau. I get 'green' indigestion. I must get rid of this sensation into a picture. Green rules it. A painter paints to unload himself of feelings and visions. People seize on painting to cover up their nakedness. They get what they can wherever they can. In the end I don't believe they get anything at all. They've simply cut a coat to the measure of their own ignorance. They make everything, from God to a picture, in their own image. That is why the picture-hook is the ruination of a painting.”

Pablo Picasso

Boisgeloup, winter 1934
As quoted in Futurism, ed. Didier Ottinger; Centre Pompidou / 5 Continents Editions, Milan, 2008
Quotes, 1930's, "Conversations avec Picasso," 1934–35

God , People , Secret , Art

“When there's anything to steal, I steal”

Pablo Picasso

Quoted in: Thought. Vol. 17 (1965). p. 154.
The magazine further commented:
Picasso's remark — "When there's anything to steal, I steal" — was fair warning to the competition. In modern art he has been, for years, the cock-of- the-walk, (The broody hens, one supposes, are also part of that picture.) But the book is valuable, primarily, for Picasso's observations about his own work and the work of others.
1960s

“You mustn't alway believe what I say", he once told me. "Questions tempt you to tell lies, particularly when there is no answer.”

Pablo Picasso

From Picasso, His Life and Work, Sir Roland Penrose, (1981), p. 413
Attributed from posthumous publications

Question

“I can hardly understand the importance given to the word research in connection with modern painting. In my opinion to search means nothing in painting. To find is the thing. Nobody is interested in following a man who, with his eyes fixed on the ground, spends his life looking for the purse that fortune should put in his path. The one who finds something no matter what it might be, even if his intention were not to search for it, at least arouses our curiosity, if not our admiration.”

Pablo Picasso

Source: 1920s, "Picasso Speaks" (1923), p. 315

Life , Search , Understanding , Painting

“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.”

Pablo Picasso

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

Life , Art

“The glories, trumpets, palms… and low reliefs,… all that makes a monument.”

Pablo Picasso

Les gloires, les trompettes, les palmes... et les bas-reliefs,... tout cela fait un monument.
Picasso (1952). Quoted in: Michael D. Garval (2004), "A Dream of Stone": Fame, Vision, and Monumentality in Nineteenth-century French Literary Culture. p. 226.
Picasso commented on the matter of the monument destruction in Paris.
Quotes, 1950's

“To contradict. To show one eye full face and one in profile. Nature does many things the way I do, but she hides them! My painting is a series of non-sequiturs. …”

Pablo Picasso

Quoted in: Pierre Cabanne (1977), Pablo Picasso: His Life and Times, p. 268.
Quotes, 1970's

Way , Nature , Painting

“Do you think it interests me that this painting represents two figures? These two figures existed, they exist no more. The sight of them gave me an initial emotion, little by little their real presence grew indistinct they became a fiction for me, then they disappeared, or rather, were turned into problems of all kinds. For me they are no longer two figures but shapes and colours, don’t misunderstand me, shapes and colours, though, that sum up the idea of the two figures and preserve the vibration of their”

Pablo Picasso

Boisgeloup, winter 1934
Richard Friedenthal, (1963, p. 258)
Quotes, 1930's, "Conversations avec Picasso," 1934–35

Idea , Problem , Thinking , Winter

“They speak of naturalism in opposition to modern painting. I would like to know if anyone has ever seen a natural work of art. Nature and art, being two different things, cannot be the same thing. Through art we express our conception of what nature is not. Velasquez left us his idea of the people of his epoch. Undoubtedly they were different from what he painted them, but we cannot conceive a Philip IV in any other way than the one Velasquez painted…”

Pablo Picasso

Paris 1923
As quoted in Futurism, ed. Didier Ottinger; Centre Pompidou / 5 Continents Editions, Milan, 2008, p. 312
Quotes, 1920's

People , Art , Way , Idea

“Success is dangerous. One begins to copy oneself and to copy oneself is more dangerous than to copy others.”

Pablo Picasso

Quoted in: The Artist, Vol. 93 (1978) p. 5.
1970s

Success , Success

“People who try to explain pictures are usually barking up the wrong tree.”

Pablo Picasso

Quoted in Picasso on Art (1988), ed. Dore Ashton.
Attributed from posthumous publications

People , Tree

“On August 2, 1914, I took Braque and Derain to the Gare d'Avignon [drafted as a soldier for World war 1. ] I never saw them again [not literally a fact, but the close relation between Picasso and Braque ended].”

Pablo Picasso

Quote in My Galleries and Painters, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, New York Viking Press, 1971, p. 46
Picasso in a talk c. 1955, with Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler
Quotes, 1950's

War , World

“Cubism is no different from any other school of painting. The same principles and the same elements are common to all. The fact that for a long time cubism has not been understood and that even today there are people who cannot see anything in it, means nothing. I do not read English, and an English book is a blank to me. This does not mean that the English language does not exist, and why should I blame anyone but myself if I cannot understand what I know nothing about?”

Pablo Picasso

Source: 1920s, "Picasso Speaks" (1923), p. 319.

People , Books , School , Understanding

“In the old days pictures went forward toward completion by stages. Every day brought something new. A picture used to be a sum of additions. In my case a picture is a sum of destructions. I do a picture — then I destroy it. In the end though, nothing is lost: the red I took away from one place turns up somewhere else”

Pablo Picasso

Herschel Browning Chip (1968, p. 267)
Other translation:
Formerly pictures used to move towards completion in progressive stages. Each day would bring something new. A picture was a sum of additions. With me, picture is a sum of destructions. I do a picture, then I destroy it. But in the long run nothing is lost; the red that I took away from one place turns up somewhere else.
Richard Friedenthal (1968, p. 256); Also quoted in: John Bowker (1988), Is anybody out there?: religions and belief in God in the contemporary world. p. 57.
1930s, "Conversations avec Picasso," 1934–35

“Among the several sins that I have been accused of committing, none is more false than the one that I have, as the principal objective in my work, the spirit of research. When I paint my object is to show what I have found and not what I am looking for. In art intentions are not sufficient and, as we say in Spanish, love must be proved by facts and not by reasons…”

Pablo Picasso

Paris 1923
As quoted in Futurism, ed. Didier Ottinger; Centre Pompidou / 5 Continents Editions, Milan, 2008, p. 311
Quotes, 1920's

Love , Art , Painting , Falseness

“Many think that Cubism is an art of transition, an experiment which is to bring ulterior results. Those who think that way have not understood it. Cubism is not either a seed or a foetus, but an art dealing primarily with forms, and when a form is realized it is there to live its own life. A mineral substance, having geometric formation, is not made so for transitory purposes, it is to remain what it is and will always have its own form.”

Pablo Picasso

Source: 1920s, "Picasso Speaks" (1923), p. 323.

Life , Art , Way , Thinking

“How can you expect a beholder to experience my picture as I experienced it? A picture comes to me a long time beforehand; who knows how long a time beforehand, I sensed, saw, and painted it and yet the next day even I do not understand what I have done. How can anyone penetrate my dreams, my instincts, my desires, my thought, which have taken a long time to fashion themselves and come to the surface, above all to grasp what I put there, perhaps involuntary.”

Pablo Picasso

Richard Friedenthal, (1963, p. 260).
1930s, "Conversations avec Picasso," 1934–35

Dreams , Fashion , Understanding , Sense

“Neither is there figurative and non-figurative art. All things appear to us in the shape of forms. Even in metaphysics ideas are expressed by forms, well then think how absurd it would be to think of painting without the imagery of forms. A figure, an object, a circle, are forms; they affects us more or less intensely.”

Pablo Picasso

Boisgeloup, winter 1934
Richard Friedenthal, (1963, pp. 257-258).
Quotes, 1930's, "Conversations avec Picasso," 1934–35

Art , Idea , Thinking , Appearance

“I was thinking about Casagemas's death that started me painting in blue.”

Pablo Picasso

Quoted in Pierre Daix, La Vie de Peintre de Pablo Picasso, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1977.
Picasso explained his friend Pierre Daix (around 1965), why he started painting in blue early around 1905. Picasso had made a portrait of Carles Casagemas in 1899.
1970s
Original: C’est en passant que Casagemas était mort que je me suis mis à piendre en bleu

Death , Thinking , Painting

“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.”

Pablo Picasso

Quote (1964); as quoted in Picasso and Company (trans. 1966) by Gyula Brassaï
1960s

Time , Drawing

“Drink to me. Drink to my health. You know I can't drink any more.”

Pablo Picasso

Quoted in: Scott Slater, ‎Alec Solomita (1980), Exits: stories of dying moments & parting words. p. 8.
Slater & Solomita (1980) explained:
"It was a spirited dinner and Picasso a cheerful, genial host. After the meal, while pouring wine into a friend's glass, Picasso said, Drink to me. Drink to my health. You know I can't drink any more. A little later, about 11:30 P.M., he left his guests, saying, And now I must go back to work. He was up painting until 3:00 A.M. That morning Picasso woke at 11:30, unable to move. By 11:40 he was dead..".
1970s

Health , Drink

“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.”

Pablo Picasso

Boisgeloup, winter 1934
Richard Friendenthal (1963, p. 256).
Quotes, 1930's, "Conversations avec Picasso," 1934–35

People , Winter