"Why do you try to understand art? Do you try to understand the song of a bird?"
"The academic teaching on beauty is false. We have been misled, but so completely misled that we can no longer find so much as a shadow of a truth again. The beauties of the Parthenon, the Venuses, the Nymphs, the Narcisusses, are so may lies. Art is not the application of a canon of beauty, but what the instinct and the brain can conceive independently of that canon."
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Source: Attributed in Wash. Post, 30 Nov. 1952. The Post article is quoting an article in Quick Magazine from the summer of 1951. According to a letter by William S. Rubin in the New York Times, 5 Jan. 1969, this is a trumpery originated in Il Libro Nero published by Giovanni Papini in 1951.
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More quotes by Pablo Picasso
"The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away."
"I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it."
"Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist."
"Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone."
"Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life."