As for Picasso, the specialist was amazed by the rapidity of his understanding. The tradition he came from had prepared him better than ours for a pr… - Jean Metzinger

Gleizes was only trying to reduce the curvature of natural volumes to adapt them more naturally and rigorously to the surface of the painting, a surface which he believed to be continuous with the wall and, for all practical purposes, with no curvature at all.

The excuse that the painters were documenting reality was becoming ridiculous. Photographers and film makers went far beyond them. Already it could be said that a good portrait led one to think about the painter not the model.

Whether it is Juan Gris taking objects apart, Picasso replacing them with objects of his own invention, or another who replaces conical perspective by a system based on the relations between perpendiculars, all that only goes to show that Cubism was not at all born out of an authoritative theory [mot d'ordre]; that it only marked among a few painters the will to be finished with an art that never ought to have survived the condemnation pronounced upon it by Pascal.