Georges Braque Quotes

I am always working on a number of canvases at one time, eight, ten.. ..I take years to finish them, but I look at them each day.. .You see the advantage of not working from real life – the apples would be rotten long before I completed my canvas.. .I find that it is important to work slowly. Anyone who looks at such a canvas will follow the same path the artist took, and he will experience that it is the path which counts more than the outcome of it, and that the route taken has been the most interesting part.

...when objects shattered into fragments appeared in my painting about 1909; this for me was a way of getting closest to the object.. .Fragmentation helped me to establish space and movement in space.

The whole Renaissance tradition is antipathic to me. The hard-and-fast rules of perspective which it succeeded in imposing on art were a ghastly mistake which it has taken four centuries to redress; Cézanne and after him Picasso and myself can take a lot of credit for this.. ..scientific perspective forces the objects in a picture to disappear away from the beholder instead of bringing them within his reach as painting should.

Colour could give rise to sensations which would interfere with our [Braque & Picasso's, in the start of Cubism] conception of space.

Picasso and I said things to each other during those particular years [c. 1908 -1913] that nobody would any longer know how to say, that nobody would be able to understand any.. ..things that would be incomprehensible, and which gave us so much pleasure.

Tactile space separates us from objects, as opposed to visual space, which separates objects from one another. I have spent my life trying to paint the former kind.

Evidence exhausts the truth.

We [ Picasso and Braque], were living in Montmartre, we saw each other every day.. ..We were like two mountaineers roped together.

I felt dissatisfied with traditional perspective. Merely a mechanical process, this perspective never conveys things in full. It starts from one viewpoint and never gets away from it. But the viewpoint is quite unimportant. It is though someone were to draw profiles all his life, leading people to think that a man has only one eye.. .When one got to thinking like that, everything changed, you cannot imagine how much!

The arts which achieve their effect through purity have never been arts that were good for everything. Greek sculpture (among others) with its decadence, teaches us this.

It is the act of painting, not the finished painting.

Whatever is valuable in painting is precisely what one is incapable of talking about.

To avoid a projection towards infinity I am interposing overlaid planes a short way off. To make it understood that things are in front of each other instead of being scattered in space.

In art progress consists not in extension but in the knowledge of its limits.

It is the limitation of means that determine style, gives rise to new forms and makes creativity possible.