Jacques Lipchitz Quotes

In the beginning, the cubists broke up form without even knowing they were doing it. Probably the compulsion to show multiple sides of an object forced us to break the object up - or, even better, to project a panorama that unfolded different facets of the same object.

The basis for my own work during the years just before coming to America in 1915 was a desire to break up forms - to 'decompose' them much along the lines the cubists had done. But I wanted to go further - much further - in fact, in quite another direction altogether.

Cubism is an anatomical chart of a way of seeing external objects. But I want to confuse the meaning of the act of looking.

In a portrait, you have room to have a point of view. The image may not be literally what's going on, but it's representative.

We would get 20 different angles and then cut them all together. That's what I called it at the time - the 'cubistic' treatment of shooting football. It was the same thing Picasso did except we did it with a football play. It's taking a single image and looking at it from multiple perspectives.

I think when somebody's painting they don't necessarily... I'm not illustrating what I know. I'm mapping out, like topographically, some terrain I am satisfied with, how awkward that mark is.

I paint what I see, not what a camera would see.

What is art but a way of seeing?

Art does not reproduce what we see; rather, it makes us see.

Height, width, and depth are the three phenomena which I must transfer into one plane to form the abstract surface of the picture, and thus to protect myself from the infinity of space.

In art it is always as though the question is what the work of art is really about.

Art is something special because it can come up with a way of approaching the truth that is a little to the side.

From the point of view of art, the butcher and the victim are equal as people. You need to see the people.

I've always worked from images that already exist in our culture, and I just tweak them - I photograph my vision/interpretation of things that already exist, and I take it to the extreme. And then I make paintings or videos.

The whole Renaissance tradition is antipethic to me. The hard-and-fast rules of perspective which it succeeded in imposing on art were a ghastly mistake which it has taken four centuries to redress; Cezanne and after him Picasso and myself can take a lot of credit for this. Scientific perspective forces the objects in a picture to disappear away from the beholder instead of bringing them within his reach as painting should.

Photography is not about the thing photographed. It is about how that thing looks photographed.

I have been continuously aware that in painting, I am always dealing with... a relational structure. Which in turn makes permission 'to be abstract' no problem at all.

Until cubism, all art, all pictures, could be 'read' by anybody. If this hadn't been so, the Christian message wouldn't have been seen by peasants and its importance would have been diminished.

Cubism is not a manner but an aesthetic, and even a state of mind; it is therefore inevitably connected with every manifestation of contemporary thought. It is possible to invent a technique or a manner independently, but one cannot invent the whole complexity of a state of mind.

Photography is Art and Art is Photography.

Thanks to art, instead of seeing one world, our own, we see it multiplied and as many original artists as there are, so many worlds are at our disposal.

Somebody was saying to Picasso that he ought to make pictures of things the way they are-objective pictures. He mumbled that he wasn't quite sure what that would be. The person who was bullying him produced a photograph of his wife from his wallet and said, "There, you see, that is a picture of how she really is." Picasso looked at it and said, "She is rather small, isn't she? And flat?"

When you think of painting as painting it is rather absurd. The real world is before us - glorious sunlight and activity and fresh air, and high speed motor cars and television, all the animation - a world apart from a little square of canvas that you smear paint on.

What you see from here is not what you see from there.

The artist does not draw what he sees, but what he has to make others see.