Pablo Picasso Quotes

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.

Like many members of the uncultured, Cheez-It consuming public, I am not good at grasping modern art.

People see so many things in the paintings. Although I never think of them, it charms me a little bit that people actually project actual scenarios on to the paintings. Hopefully that means that they have a little bit of life to them. Figuring out the rhythm, the structural element has been the key thing in this work, more than the color element. It really was the variety of different widths that lead to a certain movement, a rhythm. Otherwise I'd fall into anything that was too stripy or almost like bar codes, and it thwarted the natural flow of the painting.

It became a question of taste. I have a certain taste in art history. And that - I had a huge library of art history books in my studio. And I would simply have the models go through those books with me, and we began a conversation about, like, what painting means, why we do it, why people care about it why or how it can mean or make sense today.

When you look at art made by other people, you see what you need to see in it.

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.

People discuss my art and pretend to understand as if it were necessary to understand, when it's simply necessary to love.

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.

Sometimes I think that there's a fine line between impressionistic and messy.

Viewing abstract art requires more imagination. The result is more intense involvement of the viewer—more pleasurable.

You don't have to know anything about art to appreciate it or to look at it. There aren't any hidden secrets or things that you're supposed to understand.

The Cubists used the figure, but they broke it up.

I have painted portraits that to me are almost photographic. I remember hesitating to show the paintings, they looked so real to me. But they have passed into the world as abstractions - no one seeing what they are.

When van Gogh paints sunflowers, he reveals, or achieves, the vivid relation between himself, as man, and the sunflower, as sunflower, at that quick moment of time. His painting does not represent the sunflower itself. We shall never know what the sunflower itself is. And the camera will visualize the sunflower far more perfectly than van Gogh can.

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.

The Cubists are entitled to the serious attention of all who find enjoyment in the colored puzzle pictures of the Sunday newspapers.

I don't know if it's art, but I know I like it.

Art is a foreign city, and we deceive ourselves when we think it familiar. We have to recognize that the language of art, all art, is not our mother tongue.

In every art we are always obliged to return to the accepted means of expression, the conventional language of the art. What is a black-and-white drawing but a convention to which the beholder has become so accustomed that with his mind's eye he sees a complete equivalent in the translation from nature?

I didn't see an abstract painting until I was 18, when I went to Vincent Price's house and saw Richard Niebencorn, Wolff, Jackson Pollack. He had an amazing collection. I didn't know people painted abstractly, I thought I was just doing something wholeheartedly.

Painters understand nature and love it, and teach us to see.

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 spite the mountains of books written about art, no precise definition of art has been constructed. And the reason for this is that the conception of art has been based on the conception of beauty.

If I have called Cubism a new order, it is without any revolutionary ideas or any reactionary ideas... One cannot escape from one's own epoch, however revolutionary one may be.