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Pablo Picasso

72 quotes

“For me, there are two kinds of women — goddesses and doormats.”
Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) first seen 1969 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quoted in: Briton Hadden, ‎Henry Robinson Luce (1969), Time, Vol. 93. p. 66.
“I was thinking about Casagemas's death that started me painting in blue.”
Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) said by 1973 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quoted in Pierre Daix, La Vie de Peintre de Pablo Picasso, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1977.
“To contradict. To show one eye full face and one in profile. Nature does many things the way I do, but she hides them! My painting is a series of non-sequiturs. ...”
Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) said by 1973 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quoted in: Pierre Cabanne (1977), Pablo Picasso: His Life and Times, p. 268.
“Success is dangerous. One begins to copy oneself and to copy oneself is more dangerous than to copy others.”
Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) said by 1973 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quoted in: The Artist, Vol. 93 (1978) p. 5.
“Drink to me. Drink to my health. You know I can't drink any more.”
Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) said by 1973 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quoted in: Scott Slater, ‎Alec Solomita (1980), Exits: stories of dying moments & parting words. p. 8.
“I don't know where he [ Marc Chagall ] gets those images; he must have an angel in his head.”
Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) said by 1973 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in Marc Chagall, – a Biography, by Sidney Alexander, Cassell, London, 1978, p. 33
“Nothing can be accomplished without solitude; I have made a kind of solitude for myself.”
Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) said by 1973 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To find is the thing.”
Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) said by 1973 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I do not see why so much importance should be attached to the idea of 'research' in painting.”
Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) said by 1973 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I treat paintings as I treat objects. If a window in a picture looks wrong, I close it and draw the curtains, just as I would do in my own room.”
Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) said by 1973 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For me, art has neither past nor future. All I have ever made was for the present.”
Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) said by 1973 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For a long time I limited myself to one colour — as a form of discipline.”
Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) said by 1973 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: quoted in Picasso on Art (1988), ed. Dore Ashton
“You mustn't alway believe what I say", he once told me. "Questions tempt you to tell lies, particularly when there is no answer.”
Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) said by 1973 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: From Picasso, His Life and Work, Sir Roland Penrose, (1981), p. 413
“I begin with an idea and then it becomes something else. After all, what is a painter? He is a collector who gets what he likes in others by painting them himself. This is how I begin and then it becomes something else.”
Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) said by 1973 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quoted in: Ann Livermore (1988), Artists and Aesthetics in Spain. p. 154
“People who try to explain pictures are usually barking up the wrong tree.”
Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) said by 1973 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quoted in Picasso on Art (1988), ed. Dore Ashton.
“Their forms had no more influence on me than they did on Matisse. Or Derain. But for them, the masks were sculptures like all others. When Matisse showed me his first African head, he spoke to me of Egyptian art.”
Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) said by 1973 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Andre Malraux cites Picasso in: Anatoliĭ Podoksik, ‎Marina Aleksandrovna Bessonova, ‎Pablo Picasso (1989), Picasso: The Artists Work in Soviet Museums. p. 13.
“La inspiración existe, pero tiene que encontrarte trabajando.”
Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) said by 1973 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: In: Tomás R. Villasante (1994), Las ciudades hablan: identidades y movimientos sociales en seis metrópolis latinoamericanas. p. 264.
“People want to find a 'meaning' in everything and everyone. That's the disease of our age, an age that is anything but practical but believes itself to be more practical than any other age.”
Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) said by 1973 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quoted in: Ingo F. Walther (1996), Picasso, p. 67.
“It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.”
Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) said by 1973 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quoted in: Peter Erskine, ‎Rick Mattingly (1998), Drum Perspective, p. 73.
“When I went to Trocadéro it was disgusting. ...The smell. I was all alone. I wanted to get away. But... I stayed. ...I understood something very important... was happening to me... The masks... were magical things. ...The Negroes' sculptures were intercessors... Against everything; against unknown threatening spirits. I kept looking at the fetishes. I understood: I too am against everything. I too think everything is unknown, is the enemy! Everything! ...I understood ...the purpose ...all the fetishes were ...weapons. To help people stop being dominated by spirits, to become independent. Tools. If we give form to the spirits, we become independent of them. The spirits, the unconscious... emotion, it's the same thing. I understood why I was a painter. All alone in that awful museum, with the masks, the redskin dolls, the dusty mannequins. must have come to me that day, but not at all because of the forms: but because it was my first canvas of —yes, absolutely!”
Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) first seen 1906 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview with André Malraux (1937) describing a 1907 experience in the Palais du Trocadéro ethnographic museum, as quoted by Jean-Louis Paudrat, "From Africa", Primitivism and 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal a…
“Everyone wants to understand painting. Why don't they try to understand the song of the birds? Why do they love a night, a flower, everything which surrounds man, without attempting to understand them? Whereas where painting is concerned, they want to understand. Let them understand above all that the artist works from necessity; that he, too, is a minute element of the world to whom one should ascribe no more importance than so many things in nature which charm us but which we do not explain to ourselves. Those who attempt to explain a picture are on the wrong track most of the time. Gertrude Stein, overjoyed, told me some time ago that she had finally understood what my picture represented: three musicians. It was a still life!! [Boisgeloup, winter 1934].”
Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) said by 1973 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in Futurism, ed. Didier Ottinger; Centre Pompidou / 5 Continents Editions, Milan, 2008
“The painter goes through states of fullness and evacuation. That is the whole secret of art. I go for a walk in the forest of Fontainebleau. I get 'green' indigestion. I must get rid of this sensation into a picture. Green rules it. A painter paints to unload himself of feelings and visions. People seize on painting to cover up their nakedness. They get what they can wherever they can. In the end I don't believe they get anything at all. They've simply cut a coat to the measure of their own ignorance. They make everything, from God to a picture, in their own image. That is why the picture-hook is the ruination of a painting. [Boisgeloup, winter 1934].”
Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) said by 1973 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in Futurism, ed. Didier Ottinger; Centre Pompidou / 5 Continents Editions, Milan, 2008