Georges Braque Quotes & Sayings

I do not believe in things. I believe in relationships. — Georges Braque

Emotion should not be rendered by an excited trembling; it can neither be added on nor be imitated. It is the seed, the work is the flower. — Georges Braque

To work from nature is to improvise. — Georges Braque

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. — Georges Braque

I do not believe in objects. I believe only in their relationships. — Georges Braque

Art is meant to disturb. Science reassures. — Georges Braque

In art there is only one thing that counts: the bit that cannot be explained. — Georges Braque

Never join an organization. — Georges Braque

To explain away the mystery of a great painting - if such a feat were possible - would do irreparable harm ... If there is no mystery, then there is no poetry, the quality I value above all else in art. — Georges Braque

Limited means often constitute the charm and force of primitive painting. Extension, on the contrary, leads the arts to decadence. — Georges Braque

There is more sensitivity in technique than in the rest of the picture. — Georges Braque

One has to arrive at a specific temperature, at which the objects become malleable. — Georges Braque

When one reaches this state of harmony between things and one's self, one reaches a state of perfect freedom and peace-which makes everything possible and right. Life becomes perpetual revelation. — Georges Braque

Truth exists, only falsehood has to be invented. — Georges Braque

Painting is a nail to which I fasten my ideas. — Georges Braque

In a painting, what counts is the unexpected. — Georges Braque

Poetry is to a painting what life is to man. — Georges Braque

I thought that from the moment someone else could do the same as myself, there was no difference between the pictures and they should not be signed. Afterwards I realized it was not so and began to sign my pictures again. Picasso had begun again anyhow. — Georges Braque

What greatly attracted me - and it was the main line of advance of Cubism - was how to give material expression to this new space of which I had an inkling. So I began to paint chiefly still lifes, because in nature there is a tactile, I would almost say a manual space ... that was the earliest Cubist painting - the quest for space. — Georges Braque

We will never have repose. The present is perpetual. — Georges Braque

In art, progress lies not in an extension, but in a knowledge of limitations. — Georges Braque

Writing is not describing, painting is not depicting. Verisimilitude is merely an illusion. — Georges Braque

The space between the dish and the pitcher, that I paint also. — Georges Braque

It is the limitation of means that determines style, gives rise to new forms and makes creativity possible. — Georges Braque

If we had never met Picasso, would Cubism have been what it is? I think not. The meeting with Picasso was a circumstance in our lives. — Georges Braque

Art is polymorphic. A picture appears to each onlooker under a different guise. — Georges Braque

Colour could give rise to sensations which would interfere with our conception of space. — Georges Braque

One must not imitate what one wants to create. — Georges Braque

It is the unforeseeable that creates the event. — Georges Braque

There is only one valuable thing in art: the thing you cannot explain. — Georges Braque

Work to perfect the mind. There is no certitude but in what the mind conceives. — Georges Braque

I like the rule that corrects emotion. — Georges Braque

With age, art and life become one. — Georges Braque

We must not imitate that which we seek to create. — Georges Braque

Perspective is a ghastly mistake which it has taken four centuries to redress. — Georges Braque

I couldn't portray a women in all her natural loveliness.. I haven't the skill. No one has. I must, therefore, create a new sort of beauty, the beauty that appears to me in terms of volume of line, of mass, of weight, and through that beauty interpret my subjective impression. Nature is mere a pretext for decorative composition, plus sentiment. It suggests emotion, and I translate that emotion into art. I want to express the absolute, not merely the factitious woman. — Georges Braque

I have made a great discovery. I no longer believe in anything. Objects don't exist for me except in so far as a rapport exists between them and myself. When one attains this harmony, one reaches a sort of intellectual non-existence, what I can only describe as a sense of peace, which makes everything possible and right. Life then becomes a perpetual revelation. That is true poetry. — Georges Braque

The starting point of a picture for any painter is a matter of colors and form ... I believe that the poetry of art - if that is what one may call it - is a matter of animating these forms and colors. — Georges Braque

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

Truth exists; only lies are invented. — Georges Braque

Nature is a mere pretext for a decorative composition, plus sentiment. It suggests emotion, and I translate that emotion into art. — Georges Braque

Take the birds which you'll have noticed in so many of my recent paintings. I never thought them up, they just materialized of their own accord; they were born on the canvas ... it is absurd to read any sort of symbolic significance into them. — Georges Braque

Progress in art does not consist in reducing limitations, but in knowing them better. — Georges Braque

Critics should help people see for themselves; they should never try to define things, or impose their own explanations, though I admit that if ... a critic's explanations serve to increase the general obscurity, that's all to the good. — Georges Braque

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. — Georges Braque

Out of limitations, new forms emerge — Georges Braque

Reality only reveals itself when it is illuminated by a ray of poetry. — Georges Braque

To define a thing is to substitute the definition for the thing itself. — Georges Braque

The things that Picasso and I said to one another during those years will never be said again, and even if they were, no one would understand them anymore. It was like being roped together on a mountain. — Georges Braque

I couldn't portray a woman in all her natural loveliness ... I haven't the skill. No one has. I must, therefore, create a new sort of beauty ... — Georges Braque

The painter thinks in terms of form and color. The goal is not to be concerned with the reconstitution of an anecdotal fact, but with constitution of a pictorial fact. — Georges Braque

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. — Georges Braque

Evidence exhausts the truth. — Georges Braque

I do not think my painting has ever been revolutionary. It was not directed against any kind of painting. I have never wanted to prove that I was right and someone else wrong ... — Georges Braque

The painting is finished when the idea has disappeared. — Georges Braque

Poetry' is what distinguishes the cubist paintings Picasso and I arrived at intuitively from the lifeless sort of painting those who followed us tried, with such unfortunate results, to arrive at theoretically. — Georges Braque

I realized that one cannot reveal oneself without mannerism, without some evident trace of one's personality. But all the same one should not go too far in that direction ... — Georges Braque

Whatever is in common is true; but likeness is false. — Georges Braque

You put a blob of yellow here, and another at the further edge of the canvas: straight away a rapport is established between them. Colour acts in the way that music does ... — Georges Braque

Colour acts simultaneously with form, but has nothing to do with form. — Georges Braque

If I have called Cubism a new order, it is without any revolutionary ideas or any reactionary ideas ... One cannot escape from one's own epoch, however revolutionary one may be. — Georges Braque

Once an object has been incorporated in a picture it accepts a new destiny. — Georges Braque

Art is a wound turned into light. — Georges Braque

One day I noticed that I could go on working my art motif no matter what the weather might be. I no longer needed the sun, for I took my light everywhere with me. — Georges Braque

The function of Art is to disturb. Science reassures. — Georges Braque

Art is made to trouble but science reassures. — Georges Braque

Perspective 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 ... — Georges Braque

I am much more interested in achieving unison with nature than in copying it. — Georges Braque

The whole Renaissance tradition is antipethic 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; Cezanne 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 form the beholder instead of bringing them within his reach as painting should. — Georges Braque

Illusions ... are simple facts, but they have been created by the mind, by the spirit, and they are one of the justifications of the new spatial configuration. — Georges Braque

I considered that the painter's personality should be kept out of things, and therefore pictures should be anonymous. It was I who decided that pictures should not be signed, and for a time Picasso did the same. — Georges Braque

One has to guard against a formula that is good for everything, that can interpret reality in addition to the other arts, and that rather than creating can only result in a style, or a stylization. — Georges Braque

It is not sufficient that what one paints should be made visible. It must be made tangible. — Georges Braque

Thanks to the oval I have discovered the meaning of the horizontal and the vertical. — Georges Braque

I wanted to create a kind of substance by means of brush-work. But that is the kind of discovery which one makes gradually ... Thus it was that I subsequently began to introduce sand, sawdust and metal filings into my pictures. — Georges Braque