Quote collection
437 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon. When we love a woman we don't start measuring her limbs."
"Art is the best possible introduction to the culture of the world. I love it for the buried hopes, the garnered memories, the tender feelings it can summon at a touch. It washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life."
"I have never made radically different experiments. Whenever I wanted to say something, I said it the way I believed I should."
"Art is lies that tell the truth."
"Variation does not mean evolution. If an artist varies his mode of expression this only means that he has changed his manner of thinking, and in changing, it might be for the better or it might be for the worse."
"For me painting is a dramatic action in the course of which reality finds itself split apart"
"To find is the thing."
"The trouble is, we've been taught what to see and how to render what we see. If only we could be in the position of those men who did those wonderful drawings in Lascaux and Altimira!"
"For being a bad student I was banished to the 'calaboose' - a bare cell with whitewashed walls and a bench to sit on. I liked it there, because I took along a sketch pad and drew incessantly I could have stayed there forever drawing without stopping"
"Whatever the source of emotion that drives me to create, I want to give it a form which has some connection with the visible world, even if it is only to wage war on that world....I want my paintings to be able to defend themselves to resist the invader, just as though there were razor blades on all surfaces so no one could touch them without cutting his hands."
"I consider a work of art as a product of calculations, calculations that are frequently unknown to the author himself."
"The secret of many of my deformations - which many people do not understand - is that there is an interaction, an intereffect between the lines in a painting: one line attracts the other and at the point of maximum attraction the lines curve in toward the attracting point and form is altered."
"Photography has arrived at the point where it is capable of liberating painting from all literature, from the anecdote, and even from the subject. In any case, a certain aspect of the subject now belongs to the domain of photography. So shouldn't painters profit from their newly acquired liberty, and make use of it to do other things?"
"I hate it when people pilfer my things."
"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."
"I have a horror of people who speak about the beautiful. What is the beautiful? One must speak of problems in painting!"
"When you start with a portrait and try to find pure form by abstracting more and more, you must end up with an egg."
"Are we to paint what's on the face, what's inside the face, or what's behind it?"
"The only pictorial matter that is of interest to me is the matter and sentiments brought about by the work itself."
"In one way or another, I always marked my pictures. But there were times when I put my signature on the back of the canvas. All my works from the cubist period, until about 1914, have my name and the date on the back side of the stretcher. I know someone spread the story that in Céret, Braque and I decided not to sign our pictures anymore. But that's just a legend!"