“Art is the elimination of the unnecessary. ”
“I paint objects as I think them not as I see them.”
“It takes a long time to become young.”
“Everything is a miracle. It is a miracle that one does not dissolve in one’s bath like a lump of sugar.”
“Now there is fame! Of all — hunger, misery, the incomprehension by the public — fame is by far the worst. It is the castigation of God by the artist. It is sad. It is true.”
“Action is the foundational key to all success.”
“Good artists copy, great artists steal”
“The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider’s web.”
“What one does is what counts and not what one had the intention of doing.”
“Everything you can imagine is real.”
“What might be taken for a precocious genius is the genius of childhood. When the child grows up, it disappears without a trace. It may happen that this boy will become a real painter some day, or even a great painter. But then he will have to begin everything again, from zero.”
“Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.”
“Every child is an artist. The problem is to remain an artist once they grow up.”
“Unless your work gives you trouble, it is no good.”
“Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.”
“Sculpture is the best comment that a painter can make on painting.”
“I am always doing things I can’t do, that’s how I get to do them.”
“Never permit a dichotomy to rule your life, a dichotomy in which you hate what you do so you can have pleasure in your spare time. Look for a situation in which your work will give you as much happiness as your spare time.”
“He can who thinks he can, and he can’t who thinks he can’t. This is an inexorable, indisputable law.”
“It is personality with a penny’s worth of talent. Error which chances to rise above the commonplace.”
“Disciples be damned. It’s not interesting. It’s only the masters that matter. Those who create.”
“Museums are just a lot of lies, and the people who make art their business are mostly imposters. We have infected the pictures in museums with all our stupidities, all our mistakes, all our poverty of spirit. We have turned them into petty and ridiculous things.”
“To copy others is necessary, but to copy oneself is pathetic.”
“Colors, like features, follow the changes of the emotions.”
“It is your work in life that is your ultimate seduction.”
“Drawing is a kind of hypnotism: one looks in such a way at the model, that he comes and takes a seat on the paper.”
“The chief enemy of creativity is good taste.”
“I who have been involved with all styles of painting can assure you that the only things that fluctuate are the waves of fashion which carry the snobs and speculators; the number of true connoisseurs remains more or less the same.”
“The more technique you have, the less you have to worry about it. The more technique there is, the less there is.”
“Art is never chaste. It ought to be forbidden to ignorant innocents, never allowed into contact with those not sufficiently prepared. Yes, art is dangerous. Where it is chaste, it is not art.”
“Drink to me.”
“Accidents, try to change them — it’s impossible. The accidental reveals man.”
“We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.”
“Through art we express our conception of what nature is not.”
“Sculpture is the art of the intelligence.”
“If everybody is looking for it, then nobody is finding it. If we were cultured, we would not be conscious of lacking culture. We would regard it as something natural and would not make so much fuss about it. And if we knew the real value of this word we would be cultured enough not to give it so much importance.”
“Every act of creation is first of all an act of destruction.”
“Why do two colors, put one next to the other, sing? Can one really explain this? no. Just as one can never learn how to paint.”
“Is there anything more dangerous than sympathetic understanding?”
“An idea is a point of departure and no more. As soon as you elaborate it, it becomes transformed by thought.”
“My mother said to me, ‘If you become a soldier you’ll be a general; if you become a monk you’ll end up as the Pope.’ Instead, I became a painter and wound up as Picasso.”
“When you start with a portrait and search for a pure form, a clear volume, through successive eliminations, you arrive inevitably at the egg. Likewise, starting with the egg and following the same process in reverse, one finishes with the portrait.”
“One does a whole painting for one peach and people think just the opposite — that particular peach is but a detail.”
“Ah, good taste! What a dreadful thing! Taste is the enemy of creativeness.”
“I have a horror of people who speak about the beautiful. What is the beautiful? One must speak of problems in painting!”
“The people who make art their business are mostly impostors.”
“The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.”
“If I spit, they will take my spit and frame it as great art.”
“Matisse makes a drawing, then he makes a copy of it. He recopies it five times, ten times, always clarifying the line. He’s convinced that the last, the most stripped down, is the best, the purest, the definitive one; and in fact, most of the time, it was the first. In drawing, nothing is better than the first attempt.”
“Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth.”
“I don’t believe in accidents. There are only encounters in history. There are no accidents. ”
“Work is necessary for man. Man invented the alarm clock.”
“Often while reading a book one feels that the author would have preferred to paint rather than write; one can sense the pleasure he derives from describing a landscape or a person, as if he were painting what he is saying, because deep in his heart he would have preferred to use brushes and colors.”
“Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.”
“To finish a work? To finish a picture? What nonsense! To finish it means to be through with it, to kill it, to rid it of its soul, to give it its final blow the coup de grace for the painter as well as for the picture.”
“If only we could pull out our brain and use only our eyes.”
“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.”
“Youth has no age.”
“God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant, and the cat. He has no real style. He just keeps on trying other things.”
“You mustn’t always believe what I say. Questions tempt you to tell lies, particularly when there is no answer.”
“One must act in painting as in life, directly.”
“We must not discriminate between things. Where things are concerned there are no class distinctions. We must pick out what is good for us where we can find it.”
“It means nothing to me. I have no opinion about it, and I don’t care.”
“What is a face, really? Its own photo? Its make-up? Or is it a face as painted by such or such painter? That which is in front? Inside? Behind? And the rest? Doesn’t everyone look at himself in his own particular way? Deformations simply do not exist.”
“This idea of art for art’s sake is a hoax.”
“People want Art. And they are given it. But the less Art there is in painting the more painting there is.”
“By amusing myself with all these games, all this nonsense, all these picture puzzles, I became famous… I am only a public entertainer who has understood his time.”
“Enough of Art. It’s Art that kills us. People no longer want to do painting: they make art.”
“A picture lives by its legend – not by anything else.”
“There are artists who transform the sun into a yellow spot, but there are others who, thanks to their art and intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun.”
“For my part, I can’t do anything else but what I am doing.”
“Academic training in beauty is a sham. We have been so deceived, but so well deceived that we can scarcely get back even a shadow of the truth.”
“People who try to explain pictures are usually barking up the wrong tree.”
“Success is dangerous. One begins to copy oneself, and to copy oneself is more dangerous than to copy others. It leads to sterility.”
“I do not seek, I find.”
