Pablo Picasso citations

Page 3

“Quand je n'ai pas de bleu, je mets du rouge.”

“Comme l'a dit un jour Picasso, au grand scandale des gens qui l'entouraient — Je ne cherche pas, je trouve.”

“L'art lave notre âme de la poussière du quotidien.”

“L'art n'est pas chaste […], on devrait l’interdire aux ignorants innocents, ne jamais mettre en contact avec lui ceux qui y sont insuffisamment préparés. Oui, l'art est dangereux. Ou s'il est chaste, ce n'est pas de l'art.”

“On met très longtemps à devenir jeune.”

“Les gloires, les trompettes, les palmes… et les bas-reliefs,… tout cela fait un monument.”

“Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot, others transform a yellow spot into the sun.”

“You have to have an idea of what you are going to do, but it should be a vague idea.”

“The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.”

“Painting is stronger than me, it makes me do it's bidding.”

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

“It took me a lifetime.”

“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.”

“The more technique you have the less you have to worry about it. The more technique there is the less there is.”

“Who sees the human face correctly: the photographer, the mirror, or the painter?”

“The people who make art their business are mostly imposters.”

“Sex and art are the same thing.”

“Painting it's a blind man profession. Painter is painting not what he sees but what he feels.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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…”

“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.”

“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.”