Francis Picabia quotes

Francis Picabia was a French avant-garde painter, poet, and typographist associated with several major artistic movements. A central figure in the Dada movement, his works challenged traditional aesthetics with their playful, experimental nature. He influenced the development of modern art through his restless creativity and unconventional vision. Here are 31 of his quotes:

Only useless things are indispensable.

Francis Picabia

Maybe men are separated from each other only by the degree of their misery.

Francis Picabia

My arse contemplates those who talk behind my back.

Francis Picabia

A free spirit takes liberties even with liberty itself.

Francis Picabia

Knowledge is ancient error reflecting on its youth.

Francis Picabia

If you want to have clean ideas, change them as often as your shirt.

Francis Picabia

God invented concubinage, satan marriage.

Francis Picabia

Good taste is as tiring as good company.

Francis Picabia

The world is divided into two categories: failures and unknowns.

Francis Picabia

Let us never forget that the greatest man is never more than an animal disguised as a god.

Francis Picabia

Between my head and my hand, there is always the face of death.

Francis Picabia

Men have always need of god! A god to defend them against other men.

Francis Picabia

The essence of a man is found in his faults.

Francis Picabia

The family spirit has rendered man carnivorous.

Francis Picabia

Youth doesn't reason, it acts. The old man reasons and would like to make the others act in his place.

Francis Picabia

FRANCIS PICABIA is an imbecile, an idiot, a pickpocket!!! 1921 BUT He saved Arp from constipation! The first mechanical work was created by madam Tzara the Day she put little Tristan into the world, however she didn't know it funny girl Francis Picabia is an imbecilic Spanish professor who has never been dada FRANCIS PICABIA IS NOTHING FRANCIS PICABIS likes the morality of idiots Arp's binocle is Tristan's testicle FRANCIS PICABIS IS NOTHING!!!!!!!!!! But Arp was Dada before Dada.

Francis Picabia

Udnie – I see Again in Memory my Dear Udnie' is no more the portrait of a young girl than 'Edtaonisl' (counterpart of his work 'Udnie'] is the image of a prelate, as we ordinarily conceive of them. They are [both] memories of America, evocations of over there which, subtly set down like musical chords, become representative of an idea, a nostalgia, a fleeting impression.

Francis Picabia

Nature is unfair So much the better, inequality is the only bearable thing, the monotony of equality can only lead us to boredom.

Francis Picabia

The only way to win is to fight on the side of your adversaries.

Francis Picabia

Perhaps we'll be able to do beautiful things, since I have a stellar, insane desire to assassinate beauty.

Francis Picabia

It is not a recognisable scene [his two paintings 'Dances at the spring', 1912 - Picabia painted the motion and the excitement of a peasant dance while he was on his honeymoon in the countryside of Italy; one version is lost]. There is no dancer, no spring, no light, no perspective, nothing other than the visible clue of the sentiments I am trying to express... I would draw your attention to a song of colours, which will bring out for others the joyful sensations and feelings inspired in me on those summer days when I found myself somewhere in the country near the Italian border, where there was a spring in a wonderful garden. A photograph of that spring and that garden would in now way look like my painting 'Dance at a spring' I was shown for the first time at the w:Salon d'Automne in Paris in 1912.

Francis Picabia

.. giving plastic reality to inner states of the mind.

Francis Picabia