Art From Picasso Quotes & Sayings

When I was a child my mother said to me, 'If you become a soldier, you'll be a general. If you become a monk, you'll be the pope.' Instead I became a painter and wound up as Picasso. — Pablo Picasso

And you, you're an angel,' he said, scornfully, 'but an angel from a hot place. Since I'm the devil, that makes you one of my subjects. I think I'll brand you. — Francoise Gilot

Pablo Picasso was notorious for sucking the energy out of the people he met. His granddaughter Marina claimed that he squeezed people like one of his tubes of oil paints. You's have a great time hanging out all day with Picasso, and then you's go home nervous and exhausted, and Picasso would go back to his studio and paint all night, using the energy he'd sucked out of you. — Austin Kleon

You see Michelangelo and Picasso and you read literature. I had some innate inchoate yearning for that, but I never really saw where I would fit in. That's called art. And then something happened to pop music, which is that it became art under the hand of the Beatles, the Stones, and Bob Dylan and some other people. — David Chase

I have always believed and still believe that artists who live and work with spiritual values cannot and should not remain indifferent to the conflict in which the highest values of humanity and civilization are at stake. — Pablo Picasso

There is a constant ebb and flow in art historical reputations. The reputation of even the greatest figures like Picasso are in flux. — Jeffrey Deitch

God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant and the cat. He has no real style, He just goes on trying other things. — Pablo Picasso

I try to paint what I have found and not what I look for. In art, intentions are of little importance. — Pablo Picasso

If you want art, don't mess about with movies. Buy a Picasso. — Michael Winner

In 1966, while working on a feature about a Picasso exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, I recorded the pre-opening preparations and observed a moment: One of the cleaners stopped, puzzled, in front of the Picassos. I think that this is an image that can be universally understood, but with a grain of salt. I never chose this image in edits before because it seemed to me that it felt posed-the composition was a little too perfect. But, believe me, it was a lucky moment. — Micha Bar-Am

Art is the lie that enables us to realize the truth. — Pablo Picasso

I paint what I think, not what I see. — Pablo Picasso

Most of the makers of the twentieth-century mind, figures such as Freud, Heisenberg, Picasso, Joyce, and Eliot, have in common an about-face on the subject-object question and the mindmatter question; they all reject the dualism that arbitrarily and irreversibly splits the world into pieces. This rejection of dualism and the corresponding reach for monism are of the essence in understanding the revolutionary nature of twentieth-century science and art. — Jewel Spears Brooker

They say that art comes from the soul. The more drama in an artist's life, the more he can draw on for his art. Van Gogh and Picasso had troubled souls, but poor Steve Kaufman has been shot once, stabbed 3 times - all by women. That is a lot of drama for great art. — Robin Leach

I'm a Picasso, not a Vermeer — David Arnold

Paintings are but research and experiment. I never do a painting as a work of art. All of them are researches. I search constantly and there is a logical sequence in all this research. — Pablo Picasso

My goal, if I was going to do art, fine art, would have been to become Picasso or greater. — Kanye West

Art is a lie that makes us realize truth. — Pablo Picasso

This idea of art for art's sake is a hoax. — Pablo Picasso

No doubt, it is useful for an artist to know all the forms of art which have preceded or which accompany his. That is a sign of strength if it is a question of looking for a stimulus or recognizing mistakes he must avoid. — Pablo Picasso

Stay hungry. It worked for Michelangelo, it worked for Picasso, and it works for a hundred thousand artists who do it not for love (although that might play a part) but in order to put food on the table. If you want to translate the world, you need to use your appetites. Does this surprise you? It shouldn't. There's no creation without talent, I give you that, but talent is cheap. Talent goes begging. Hunger is the piston of art. — Stephen King

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. — Pablo Picasso

Picasso said that art is a lie, but a lie that tells the truth ... Calder wondered what Picasso had meant. Was it that art wasn't exactly the real world, but it said something real? — Blue Balliett

I love the work of Matisse and Picasso, but I don't have enough millions to own one. And I don't really believe in owning art, anyway. — Ravi Shankar

Art sweeps the everyday dust from your soul. — Pablo Picasso

The people no longer seek consolation in art. But the refined people, the rich, the idlers seek the new, the extraordinary, the extravagant, the scandalous. I have contented these people with all the many bizarre things that come into my head. And the less they understand, the more they admire it. By amusing myself with all these games, all this nonsense, all these picture puzzles, I became famous ... I am only a public entertainer who has understood his time. — Pablo Picasso

We artists are indestructible; even in a prison, or in a concentration camp, I would be almighty in my own world of art, even if I had to paint my pictures with my wet tongue on the dusty floor of my cell. — Pablo Picasso

Look at the paintings of Picasso. He is a great painter, but just a subjective artist. Looking at his paintings, you will start feeling sick, dizzy, something going berserk in your mind. You cannot go on looking at Picasso's painting long enough. You would like to get away, because the painting has not come from a silent being. It has come from a chaos. It is a by product of a nightmare. But ninety-nine percent art belongs to that category. — Rajneesh

Having studied art history, as opposed to political history, I tend to incorporate found objects into my books. Just as Pablo Picasso glued a fragment of furniture onto the canvas of Still Life with Chair Caning, I like to use whatever's lying around to paint pictures of the past--traditional pigment like archival documents but also the added texture of whatever bits and bobs I learn from looking out bus windows or chatting up people I bump into on the road. — Sarah Vowell

I'm a joker who has understood his epoch and has extracted all he possibly could from the stupidity, greed and vanity of his contemporaries. — Pablo Picasso

From the point of view of art, there are no concrete or abstract forms, but only forms which are more or less convincing lies. — Pablo Picasso

Through art we express our conception of what nature is not. — 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. — Pablo Picasso

Most people don't do something seminal. I've done it twice: with my tent and my bed. Picasso did it with Cubism. — Tracey Emin

Only when painting isn't painting can there be an affront to modesty. — Pablo Picasso

As an artist you have to find something that deeply interests you. It's not enough to make art that is about art, to look at Matisse and Picasso and say, how can I paint like them? You have to be obsessed by something that can't come out in any other way, then the other things - the skill and technique - will follow. — Anselm Kiefer

I'm lucky enough and wealthy enough to be able to buy photographs and buy art that inspires me from day to day. I don't want a Picasso on my wall; it's great art, but it's dead art to me. I'd rather have a photograph by someone I've never heard of that really inspires me. — Elton John

[Picasso] loved ... women for the sexual, carnivorous impulses they aroused in him. Mixing blood and sperm, he exalted women in his paintings, imposed his violence on them, and sentenced them to death once he felt their mystery had been discharged and the sexual power they instilled in him had dulled ... Women were his prey. He was the Minotaur. These were bloody, indecent bullfights from which he always emerged the dazzling victor. — Marina Picasso

Why do two colors, put one next to the other, sing? Can one really explain this? no. Just as one can never learn how to paint. — Pablo Picasso

I am fascinated that no one I have read seems to have noticed that the literature on Picasso continually turns grown-up women into girls. — Siri Hustvedt

It took the Metropolitan Museum of Art nearly 50 years to wake up to Pablo Picasso. It didn't own one of his paintings until 1946, when Gertrude Stein bequeathed that indomitable quasi-Cubistic picture of herself - a portrait of the writer as a sumo Buddha - to the Met, principally because she disliked the Museum of Modern Art. — Jerry Saltz

This resembles the slow discipline of art: it's the work that Rembrandt did, that Picasso and Yeats and Rilke and Bach did. Bucket work implies much more discipline than most men realize. — Robert Bly

Art is about imagination. When you look at a picture from Salvador Dali, that's about imagination. When you look at Picasso, that's about imagination. Doing stuff from your heart. — LL Cool J

Art is a lie that reveals the truth. — Pablo Picasso

In art, practice always comes before theory. — 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 affect us more or less intensely. — Pablo Picasso

Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist. — Pablo Picasso

Whether you create, or you observe an objective piece of creativity, meditation should be the key. Without it, mind can only spread on the canvas its nightmares. Most of the paintings of the great painters like Paul Gaugin or Picasso are almost like vomit. They could not contain their agony and suffering - it was so much they threw it on the canvas to get relief. The real objective art is not a relief; it is not a sickness that you want to get rid of. It is a blissfulness that you want to share. And by sharing, it grows; you have more of it, the more it is shared. — Rajneesh

You don't have to be Picasso or Rembrandt to create something. The fun of it, the joy of creating, is way high above anything else to do with the art form. — Chick Corea

Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life. — Pablo Picasso

My whole life has been nothing more than a continuous struggle against Reaction and the death of art. — Pablo Picasso

All human beings are born with the same creative potential. Most people squander theirs away on a million superfluous things. I expend mine on one thing and one thing only: my art. — Pablo Picasso