Picasso Quotes

“In La Tête d’Obsidienne André Malraux relates a conversation that he had with Picasso in 1937, at the time he was painting “Guernica.” Picasso said, “People are always talking about the influence of the blacks on me. What can one say? We all of us liked those fetishes. Van Gogh said, ‘We all of us had Japanese art in common.’ In our day it was the Negroes. Their forms did not influence me any more than they influenced Matisse. Or Derain. But as far as Matisse and Derain were concerned, the Negro masks were just so many other carvings, the same as the rest of sculpture. When Matisse showed me his first Negro head he talked about Egyptian art. “When I went to the Trocadéro, it was revolting. Like a flea-market. The smell. I was all by myself. I wanted to get out. I didn’t go: I stayed. It came to me that this was very important: something was happening to me, right? “Those masks were not just pieces of sculpture like the rest. Not in the least. They were magic. And why weren’t the Egyptians or Chaldees? We hadn’t understood what it was really about: we had seen primitive sculpture, not magic. These Negroes were intercessors—that’s a word I’ve known in French ever since then. Against everything: against unknown, threatening spirits. I kept on staring at these fetishes. Then it came to me—I too was against everything. I too felt that everything was unknown, hostile! Everything! Not just this and that but everything, women, children, animals, smoking, playing … Everything! I understood what their sculpture meant to the blacks, what it was really for. Why carve like that and not in any other way?”
― Patrick O'Brian, Picasso: A Biography

“He was now surrounded by a small circle of his inferiors and dependents; no one could keep him in order, as once Eluard had done; those he respected most were long since dead, and he could let himself go just as he pleased. He was, as he said himself, a man “who could say shit to anyone on earth.” He was enormously rich; and riches expose a man to pride and luxury, and a foolish elation of heart. As for pride, Lucifer could never have held a candle to Picasso at any time, riches or not; but it did occur to me that in his case luxury might, after so many years of discipline, emerge as facility, and the foolish elation of heart as a persuasion that anything he did was worth showing—that his briefest jotting down of a passing thought, in his private shorthand, was a valid communication of real importance. In short, that the rot of self-indulgence might have spread to his art. If that was so then neither his way of life nor even his work could be a satisfaction to him. If servile adulation, intensive coddling, guarding, shielding from every draught, had so reinforced the deep contradictions in his own character that they had turned him bad then obviously there was no question of happiness. It seemed unlikely that that fine head, with habitual kindness, gaiety, and strength carved deep into all its lines and wrinkles could go bad; but it was not impossible—there are innumerable instances of disastrous change pitiably late in life—and the prospect grieved me.”
― Patrick O'Brian, Picasso: A Biography

“And now it was no longer a matter of people wilfully moving his electric torch, attempting to steal his drawing-pins, hiding his valuable rubber, malignantly dusting his mounds: now it was with a far deeper conviction, indeed with real distress, that he could say, “I should not wish my fame on to anyone, not even my worst enemy … it makes me physically ill … I protect myself as well as I can … I am barricaded behind double-locked doors day and night.”
― Patrick O'Brian, Picasso: A Biography

“Three days later he burst out in a completely new direction: seven drawings transport the “Déjeuners” to the Golden Age, and they are a joy to see, for Picasso was the draughtsman of the world, and the first is as lovely as anything in his long career.”
― Patrick O'Brian, Picasso: A Biography

“The twenty years have nearly passed, and soon perhaps the voice of authority, speaking through Le Corbusier, will be heard: but so far the UNESCO picture is not looked upon as one of Picasso’s successes.”
― Patrick O'Brian, Picasso: A Biography

“It is many years since I saw the film and I cannot speak of it with any accuracy; but, mixed with the pleasure of seeing him at work, I do remember an uneasy impression that he was being put through his paces, that the fruit of immense thought and experience was presented as something like a most accomplished trick, almost a music-hall turn, carried out in minutes, as though celerity were of real significance; and this impression was strengthened by the music, the drum-roll for the vital stroke that gave apparently random lines their meaning, and indeed by the nature of some of the things that Picasso drew when he was amusing himself. The incredible virtuosity was there, but so it was when Picasso was amusing himself in a restaurant after dinner, when he drew on the napkins or made creatures out of crumbs; and Picasso is so very much more than that.”
― Patrick O'Brian, Picasso: A Biography

“As I have said, the social contract is not the same in Catalonia as it is in France; superficially it is rougher in some ways, but beneath the surface it is often far more friendly, direct, and indeed more sensitive.”
― Patrick O'Brian, Picasso: A Biography

“The first time I saw the picture if did not seem to me to have anything at all of the very great urgency and emotional charge of “Guernica”; Picasso’s deliberate survey of the two extreme states of the human condition appeared to me to have some of the weaknesses usually to be seen in Last Judgments; but whereas in most Last Judgments the blessed seem condemned to an eternity of boredom while the damned and their attendant fiends are filled with passionate life, here it was Peace that was convincing, while War, apart from those hands and the trampled book, struck me as literary and remote. Even the round-faced figure of War himself looked quite good company. I was tempted to say that Picasso, in spite of his longing for vast surfaces, could not deal with them when they were provided—that with the exception of “Guernica” his genius flowered best when it was confined. But that was a first sight, after a long day’s drive in beating rain; and it is notorious that a traveler, harassed by his voyage, by hunger, by other sightseers, tends to be captious and unreceptive—in an Italian journey Picasso himself saw Giotto unmoved—and presently, rested and fed, with the chapel to myself, I found the whole painting grow enormously in power, above all the arched picture at the end.”
― Patrick O'Brian, Picasso: A Biography

“IT has been said that pottery is not a medium that can express any very significant concept; that the technical processes which necessarily follow the artist’s work blur his line and color, destroying fine differences and taking away from the immediacy of his touch; that it is at its best when it is anonymous form and color; that in “personal” ceramics gaiety, decorativeness, and fantasy can survive but not much else; and that quite apart from the limitations of size and surface the ceramic equivalent of a “Guernica” is unthinkable. And in this particular case it has also been said that in the course of years the dispersion of Picasso’s energy over some thousands of minor objects encouraged his facility and, by sapping his concentration, did lasting damage to his creative power. This seems to me to overstate the case: but although I love many of the Picasso vases, figurines, and dishes I have seen I think few people would place his ceramics on the same level as his drawing, painting, or sculpture. It may be that he did not intend to express more than in fact he did express: or it may be that Picasso was no more able to perform the impossible than another man—that neither he nor anyone else could do away with the inherent nature of baked clay. Yet even if one were to admit that pottery cannot rise much above gaiety, fantasy, and decoration (and there are Sung bottles by the thousand as evidence to the contrary, to say nothing of the Greek vases), what a range is there! Picasso certainly thought it wide enough, and he worked on and on, learning and innovating among the wheels, the various kilns, and the damp mounds of clay in the Ramiés’ Madoura pottery, taking little time off for anything except some studies of young Claude, a certain number of lithographs and illustrations, particularly for Reverdy’s Le Chant des Morts, and for Góngora. He had always valued Góngora and this selection”
― Patrick O'Brian, Picasso: A Biography

“Understand!” cried Picasso. “What the Devil has it to do with understanding? Since when has a picture been a mathematical proof? It’s not there to explain—explain what, for God’s sake?—but to awaken feeling in the heart of the person looking at it. A work of art must not be something that leaves a man unmoved, something he passes by with a casual glance. It has to make him react, feel strongly, start creating too, if only in his imagination. He must be jerked out of his torpor, seized by the throat and shaken up; he has to be made aware of the world he’s living in, and for that he must first be jolted out of it.” Growing calmer, he told her a great deal about aesthetics that she had not known, about beauty, its relative nature, the beauty of ugliness, the prime value of imagination; then he guided her, blushing again, to the door, asked Sabartés (in the midst of a dead silence among the visitors) to give her his telephone number, and invited her to come again when her article was written.”
― Patrick O'Brian, Picasso: A Biography

“Yet at some point in all the happy turmoil Picasso changed, or was changed, from a capital painter, known as such a painter should be known, into a monstre sacré, a holy cow surrounded with an enormous, self-perpetuating, inescapable, and generally irrelevant notoriety. And whereas a capital painter may be a man among other men, of finer essence no doubt but still capable of bleeding when pricked, a sacred monster may not; and when he is pricked he must ooze gold rather than blood, or at least a kind of contagious fame. To the natural inequality between him and most men is added a factitious and often somewhat tawdry rank: he is never allowed to forget his status and he must live almost as lonely as the phoenix, surrounded by courtiers rather than friends—a hard fate for one who loved company as much as Picasso. The change did not come about at once, and its accompaniment of vast wealth, with all the possibility of corrupting power, authority, and freedom from restraint that wealth implies, was still some few years away, together with his full realization that fame was “the castigation by God of the artist,” and of the fact that a certain kind of fame means solitude.”
― Patrick O'Brian, Picasso: A Biography

“Ever since the first introduction of taxes and regulations, the French have devoted much time and energy to evading them: it is so much a part of the French way of life that even now there is an official consolation of 10 percent for those who have no possibility of concealing their exact incomes.”
― Patrick O'Brian, Picasso: A Biography

“Miles away Matisse had had much the same reaction: he was at the frontier with his passport in his pocket and the boat was waiting at Genoa to take him to Rio de Janeiro; but, as he wrote to his son, “When I saw the endless line of people leaving I had not the least desire to go … I should have felt like a deserter. If everything of any worth runs away, what will remain of France?” France meant different things to Matisse and Picasso: but although Picasso remained a Spaniard through and through, France and above all Paris nevertheless for him meant light, freedom, and the living arts, and that intemporal country, beyond all national or geographic boundaries, was where his patriotism lay.”
― Patrick O'Brian, Picasso: A Biography

“it was illustrated in the traditional Spanish and Catalan way, as an aleluya or an auca, with a series of little pictures, each self-contained but all connected.”
― Patrick O'Brian, Picasso: A Biography

“These prints carry on naturally, perhaps inevitably, to Picasso’s most important work of 1935, the “Minotauromachie.”
― Patrick O'Brian, Picasso: A Biography

“Braque was right in saying, “The only thing that matters about a painting is what cannot be explained.” Assertions that the picture is moving accomplish nothing, and the only hope of conveying some ghost of the feeling lies in description.”
― Patrick O'Brian, Picasso: A Biography

“It may be that a man has only a given power of decision, and if he uses it all up, making vital choices every day in his studio, he has none left for everyday life.”
― Patrick O'Brian, Picasso: A Biography

“The form that his new directions would take could be foretold by no one: the time of their beginning was less unpredictable. Picasso was the very type of the creative man, and since upon the whole creative men have more sensibility than they have sense it is rare to find them happy; in a world that has so much to distress even a common mind they pay a high price for their keener perceptions. And often their sexual drive is very strong, which may procure them vehement joys but which is quite certain to lead to unhappiness, equally piercing and far more durable. Picasso’s own emotions were passionate, complex, and extreme; he had been brought up in a culture that had little to say to self-control in personal relationships; and early in his life both Señora de Ruiz and Fernande observed that his nature was not of a kind to make him happy.”
― Patrick O'Brian, Picasso: A Biography

“decline of the movement, when the puerilities of the second generation of Surrealists were little more than illustrations of fabricated, unconvincing dreams, of essentially literary anecdotes as old-fashioned as Art Nouveau. Not surprisingly in a man who so valued his privacy, Picasso loathed Freud and all his works, maintaining that Freudian psychology was unscientific; nor, although no man was less of a prude, did he care for Freud’s great emphasis on the sexual drive, which also filled the Surrealist pictures with so many symbols.”
― Patrick O'Brian, Picasso: A Biography

“Obviously the Surrealists were very much in debt to Freud, whose teachings were widely and sometimes accurately diffused by the early twenties; but although these doctrines were of great value to what was primarily an intellectual and literary movement they were of less relevance to the Surrealist painters, for whom in any case the oneiric vision cannot have been so startlingly fresh, since they had before them the example of Bosch, not to mention Signorelli, Arcimboldo, Fuseli, and so many others. And for painters even the explicit theory had nothing particularly new about it, seeing that long before this Redon had said, “Everything is done by a quiet submission to the coming of the unconscious mind,” and Matisse, “You begin painting well when your hand escapes from your head.” Besides, although it is possible to speak, write, and even draw “automatically” with one’s eyes shut, and the more earnest Surrealists really did so, it is much harder to paint, and the painters were at a disadvantage. These handicaps, less evident in the days of Chirico, became obvious in the”
― Patrick O'Brian, Picasso: A Biography

“Sir Roland Penrose, my only authority for this episode, states that Picasso “was obliged to rush her to Paris, nursing her with ice-packs on the journey, while little Paulo was violently car-sick all the way.” I am sure Sir Roland’s account is exact: I am equally sure that if Picasso had time for reflection it would have occurred to him that the common lot was more attractive from a distance; that it was not at all suitable for a painter; that the entrance-fee to the community was far too high, the price for being an insider excessive. Yet if these thoughts did in fact come to him, they remained deep in his consciousness for the time, finding no outward expression for some years.”
― Patrick O'Brian, Picasso: A Biography

“Few things are easier than clapping labels on to Picasso’s more usual subjects and saying, “The bull symbolizes evil,” or, “The bull stands for the Spanish people,” or, “The café tables symbolize Bohemia, the refusal of ordinary bourgeois life,” and so on: it made him extremely impatient—”One simply paints,” he said, “one does not paste one’s ideas on a picture.” Yet is it entirely fortuitous that at the time of Don José’s death the harlequin found his way back into Picasso’s painting? The harlequin, not as a symbol but as the evidence of a certain state of mind in which loneliness was an important factor?”
― Patrick O'Brian, Picasso: A Biography

“None of this depressed Picasso, nor yet Kahnweiler: there is a kind of abuse that is a guarantee of excellence and almost of success, for surely people do not utter such shrill and vehement protests unless some Freudian resistance is at work—unless at some level they are aware of the validity of what they see.”
― Patrick O'Brian, Picasso: A Biography

“of a theory scientific rather than artistic in its origin. We see him in an early portrait an imitator of Goya, but without Goya’s wit or spontaneity. In his large composition we see him produce a work as cleverly eclectic and as sophisticated as some Italian pictures of the seventeenth century. And lastly we have his purely theoretic experiments which are unintelligible to the eye and the mind. Forgetting that these are meant to represent anything, we see very little abstract beauty of colour or design in most of them, although the still life is an exception. They depress us as if they were diagrams of a science about which we know nothing; and whereas in “La Femme au Pot de Moutarde” a human form is obscurely discernible, it seems, but for the obscurity, to be commonplace. He has every right to make his experiments, and they may perhaps prove useful to other artists in the future. He is, in fact, such a scientific experimentor as Paolo Uccello might have been if he had had no original talent of his own, or if in him a slight original talent had been overlaid by intellectual curiosity.”
― Patrick O'Brian, Picasso: A Biography

“Since Fry had helped to write the catalog he was obliged to be civil: The Times was not. Having dealt with Matisse, the paper said, the art of M. Picasso is a very different matter. He, too, is not a charlatan, but we do not believe that he is an artist of narrow and intense originality like M. Matisse. Rather he seems to us to be by nature extremely imitative, and to have endeavoured to preserve himself from imitation by the pursuit”
― Patrick O'Brian, Picasso: A Biography

“Two of his pictures had been seen at the first show in 1910, “La Fillette à la corbeille fleurie” and the modest “Clovis Sagot”;”
― Patrick O'Brian, Picasso: A Biography

“Nature morte à la chaise cannée,” in which he glued a piece of oilcloth that imitated chair-caning to an oval canvas; then over and around it he painted some ordinary café objects—a glass and a sliced lemon, severely analysed, a newspaper with the first three letters of Journal large and plain, a trompe-l’oeil pipe-stem. The result, which he framed with rope, is a bewildering array of different realities at a variety of levels, fused into a whole by some magic peculiar to Picasso: it is also the very first of all the collages and the forerunner of what the theorists, though neither Picasso nor Braque, were to call synthetic Cubism.”
― Patrick O'Brian, Picasso: A Biography

“They differed from one another and they differed from Braque and Picasso: Delaunay, for example, was unorthodox from the beginning; he insisted upon the role of light and color, and presently he moved on, or off, to a painting that Apollinaire baptized Orphism: Léger’s variations earned him the name of Tubist: Marcel Duchamp introduced movement: Jacques Villon described himself as an Impressionist-Cubist, and he refused to abandon his subtle shades: and in time many of the others relinquished the object entirely and with it all reference to reality, their pictures becoming wholly abstract. But all these differences were nothing compared to the difference between the Cubists’ work and any painting that had been seen before: the Cubist revolution was fundamental; the “Demoiselles d’Avignon” had changed the very nature and concept of painting, and it could never be the same again.”
― Patrick O'Brian, Picasso: A Biography

“But there were also men of far greater value who were drawn to Cubism, men whose language was paint or sculpture: among them Léger, Picabia, Delaunay, La Fresnaye, Le Fauconnier, Dufy for a while and Friesz, Lhote, Kisling, Herbin of the Bateau-Lavoir, Survage, Marcoussis, Diego Rivera, Mondrian, Archipenko, Brancusi, Lipchitz, and perhaps the most important of them all, the three brothers Jacques Villon, Duchamp-Villon, and Marcel Duchamp.”
― Patrick O'Brian, Picasso: A Biography

“Picasso and Cézanne had this in common: when they were working on a picture it was the most important thing in life—it was life itself. Then with the last stroke it would die. Sometimes Cézanne would abandon his pictures under olive-trees: and moved by the same impulse or rather creed Picasso said, “A finished work is a dead work, killed,” and he was very unwilling to give the last mortal stroke. Yet in this as in everything else Picasso was full of apparent inconsistencies: the man who maintained that the “Demoiselles d’Avignon” was never finished and who spent months and months on Vollard’s portrait would also dash off three pictures in a day; he did not leave a few dozen laboriously perfected paintings behind him but several thousand; and although he said that his work was of no interest to him once it was done he would fly into a pale rage if he saw one of his pictures, or Cézanne’s, varnished, cleaned, or interfered with in any way. What is more, although the whole of his work was carried out in contemptuous defiance of the critics, he was exceedingly sensitive to approval: even in his eighties he would still show people his work, piling the canvases up in a tottering pyramid and watching intently for the reaction.”
― Patrick O'Brian, Picasso: A Biography