Pablo Picasso Quotes

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!

To me there is no past or future in art. If a work of art cannot live always in the present it must not be considered at all. The art of the Greeks, of the Egyptians, of the great painters who lived in other times, is not an art of the past; perhaps it is more alive today that it ever was.

After Altamira, all is decadence - we have invented nothing

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. [Boisgeloup, winter 1934].

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.

Anything new, anything worth doing, can't be recognized.

The world doesn't make sense, so why should I paint pictures that do?

There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.

Among the several sins that I have been accused of committing, none is more false than the one that I have, as the principal objective in my work, the spirit of research. When I paint my object is to show what I have found and not what I am looking for. In art intentions are not sufficient and, as we say in Spanish, love must be proved by facts and not by reasons... [Paris 1923].

Kažete da ste neshvaćeni mladi prijatelju.
Strpite se.
I dijamant je u osnovu ugljenik, ali je umeo da čeka.

I am a Communist and my painting is Communist painting.

Every positive value has its price in negative terms... the genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.

Translation: Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.

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.

Art is the elimination of the unnecessary.