What Is Art Pablo 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

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

Art is the elimination of the unnecessary." - Pablo Picasso — David Sherwin

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

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

Art is a finger up the bourgeoisie ass. — Pablo Picasso

As far as I am concerned, a painting speaks for itself. What is the use of giving explanations, when all is said and done? A painter has only one language. — 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

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

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

In art, there is neither past nor future. The art that is not in the present will never be. — Pablo Picasso

Abstract art is only painting. And what's so dramatic about that? There is no abstract art. One must always begin with something. Afterwards one can remove all semblance of reality; there is no longer any danger as the idea of the object has left an indelible imprint. — Pablo Picasso

The purpose of Art is to create enthusiasm. — Pablo Picasso

Those trying to explain pictures are as a rule completely mistaken. — Pablo Picasso

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

The function of the artist is the mythologization of the culture and the world. In the visual arts there were two men whose work handled mythological themes in a marvelous way: Paul Klee and Pablo Picasso. — Joseph Campbell

It is not what an artist does that counts ... but what he is. — Pablo 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

Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone — Pablo Picasso

What do you think an artist is? ... he is a political being, constantly aware of the heart breaking, passionate, or delightful things that happen in the world, shaping himself completely in their image. Painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war. — Pablo Picasso

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

Why do you try to understand art? Do you try to understand the song of a bird? — Pablo Picasso

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

When art critics get together they talk about Form and Structure and Meaning. When artists get together they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine. — Pablo Picasso

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

The fact that for a long time Cubism has not been understood and that even today there are people who cannot see anything in it means nothing. I do not read English, an English book is a blank book to me. This does not mean that the English language does not exist. Why should I blame anyone but myself if I cannot understand what I know nothing about? -Pablo Picasso. — Pablo Picasso

Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon. When we love a woman we don't start measuring her limbs. — Pablo Picasso

The academic teaching on beauty is false. We have been misled, but so completely misled that we can no longer find so much as a shadow of a truth again. The beauties of the Parthenon, the Venuses, the Nymphs, the Narcisusses, are so may lies. Art is not the application of a canon of beauty, but what the instinct and the brain can conceive independently of that canon. — Pablo Picasso

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

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

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

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

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

When I paint a woman in an armchair, the armchair is there to show illness and death-or as a protection. — Pablo Picasso

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

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

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

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

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

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