The Success and Failure of Picasso Quotes

“ما من رسام آخر تمتع بذيوع الصيت هذا بين مثل هذا العدد الكبير من الناس.
إن التفسير التقني لذلك إنما يكمن في وسائط الإعلام الجماهيرية. فما أن يتم انتقاء شخص ما. لسبب أو لآخر، حتى تقوم هذه الوسائط بمضاعفة جمهوره من الألوف إلى الملايين. وفي حالة بيكاسو، عمل هذا التحول على تغيير ثقل شهرته. فهي ليست كشهرة ميليه في فرنسا أو ميليز في إنجلترا قبل ثمانين عاماً. فقد اشتهر هذان لأن لوحتين أو ثلاثًا من أعمالهما نالت حظوة سريعة لدى الجمهور، فاستنسخت عنها الصور وزينت بها ملايين البيوت. إن عنواني اللوحتين كرز الناضخ والملاك كانا أكثر ذيوعًا من اسم الرسام. أما إذا نظرنا إلى الموضوع على صعيد عالمي اليوم فإننا لا نجد أكثر من واحد في المئة ممن يعرفون اسم بيكاسو يستطيع أن يميز لوحة واحدة من لوحاته.”
― جون بيرجر, بيكاسو: نجاحه وإخفاقه

“The urge to destroy is also a creative urge. It is worth comparing this famous text of Bakunin’s with one of Picasso’s most famous remarks about his own art. ‘A painting’, he said, ‘is a sum of destructions.”
― John Berger, The Success and Failure of Picasso

“Just after the Second World War Picasso bought a house in the South of France and paid for it with one still-life. Picasso has now in fact transcended the need for money. Whatever he wishes to own, he can acquire by drawing it. The truth has become a little like the fable of Midas.”
― John Berger, The Success and Failure of Picasso

“In the minds of thinking men the present is always under attack from the past and future simultaneously.”
― John Berger, The Success and Failure of Picasso

“The fact that Picasso was a child prodigy has influenced his attitude to art throughout his entire life. It is one of the reasons why he is so fascinated by his own creativity and accords it more value than what he creates. It is why he sees art as though it were part of nature.
Everyone wants to understand art. Why not try to understand the songs of a bird? Why does one love the night, flowers, everything around one, without trying to understand them? But in the case of painting people have to understand.
If only they could realize above all that an artist works of necessity, that he himself is only a trifling bit of the world, and that no more importance should be attached to him than to plenty of other things which please us in the world, though we can't explain them.”
― John Berger , The Success and Failure of Picasso

“The Cubists’ belief in progress was by no means complacent. They saw the new products, the new inventions, the new forms of energy, as weapons with which to demolish the old order. Yet at the same time their interest was profound and not simply declamatory. In this they differed fundamentally from the Futurists. The Futurists saw the machine as a savage god with which they identified themselves. Ideologically they were precursors of fascism: artistically they produced a vulgar form of animated naturalism, which was itself only a gloss on what had already been done in films. 35 Carlo Carra. The Funeral of the Anarchist Galli. 1911 The Cubists felt their way, picture by picture, towards a new synthesis which, in terms of painting, was the philosophical equivalent of the revolution that was taking place in scientific thinking: a revolution which was also dependent on the new materials and the new means of production.”
― John Berger, The Success and Failure of Picasso