Pablo Picasso quotes - page 4

For me, art has neither past nor future. All I have ever made was for the present. (Pablo Picasso)
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. View quote
Pablo Picasso
People who try to explain pictures are usually barking up the wrong tree. View quote
Pablo Picasso
In the old days pictures went forward toward completion by stages. Every day brought something new. A picture used to be a sum of additions. In my case a picture is a sum of destructions. I do a picture - then I destroy it. In the end though, nothing is lost: the red I took away from one place turns up somewhere else. View quote
Pablo Picasso
Drink to me. Drink to my health. You know I can't drink any more. View quote
Pablo Picasso
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. View quote
Pablo Picasso
It isn't up to the painter to define the symbols. Otherwise it would be better if he wrote them out in so many words! The public who look at the picture must interpret the symbols as they understand them. View quote
Pablo Picasso
I would like to manage to prevent people from ever seeing how a picture of mine has been done. What can it possibly matter? What I want is that the only thing emanating from my pictures should be emotion. View quote
Pablo Picasso
Neither is there figurative and non-figurative art. All things appear to us in the shape of forms. Even in metaphysics ideas are expressed by forms, well then think how absurd it would be to think of painting without the imagery of forms. A figure, an object, a circle, are forms; they affects us more or less intensely. View quote
Pablo Picasso
Almost every evening [in their common early-Cubist years, in Paris], either I went to Braque's studio or Braque came to mine. Each of us had to see what the other had done during the day. We criticized each other's paintings. A canvas wasn't finished unless both of us felt it was. View quote
Pablo Picasso
Do you think it interests me that this painting represents two figures? These two figures existed, they exist no more. The sight of them gave me an initial emotion, little by little their real presence grew indistinct they became a fiction for me, then they disappeared, or rather, were turned into problems of all kinds. For me they are no longer two figures but shapes and colours, don't misunderstand me, shapes and colours, though, that sum up the idea of the two figures and preserve the vibration of their. (Pablo Picasso)
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. View quote
Pablo Picasso
I do not evolve, I AM. View quote
Pablo Picasso
Go and do the things you can't. That is how you get to do them. View quote
Pablo Picasso
What do you think an artist is?... he is a political being, constantly aware of the heart breaking, passionate, or delightful things that happen in the world, shaping himself completely in their image. Painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war. View quote
Pablo Picasso
Painting is stronger than me, it makes me do it's bidding. View quote
Pablo Picasso
Everybody has the same energy potential. The average person wastes his in a dozen little ways. I bring mine to bear on one thing only: my paintings, and everything else is sacrificed to it... myself included. View quote
Pablo Picasso
When Matisse died, he left me his Odalisques 'as a legacy', he proclaimed. View quote
Pablo Picasso
When we did Cubist paintings [Picasso and Georges Braque, in their early Cubist period in Paris], our intention was not to produce Cubist paintings but to express what was within us. No one laid down a course of action for us, and our friends the poets [a. o. Appolinaire and Cendral] followed our endeavor attentively but they never dictated it to us. View quote
Pablo Picasso
...this bull is a bull and this horse is a horse... If you give a meaning to certain things in my paintings it may be very true, but it is not my idea to give this meaning. What ideas and conclusions you have got I obtained too, but instinctively, unconsciously. I make the painting for the painting. I paint the objects for what they are. View quote
Pablo Picasso
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. (Pablo Picasso)
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. ... View quote
Pablo Picasso
On August 2, 1914, I took Braque and Derain to the Gare d'Avignon [drafted as a soldier for World war 1. ] I never saw them again [not literally a fact, but the close relation between Picasso and Braque ended]. View quote
Pablo Picasso
Anything new, anything worth doing, can't be recognized. View quote
Pablo Picasso
Every now and then one paints a picture that seems to have opened a door and serves as a stepping stone to other things. View quote
Pablo Picasso