Georges Braque Quotes

Art is a wound turned into light.

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

Truth exists; only lies are invented.

Out of limitations, new forms emerge

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

In a painting, what counts is the unexpected.

I do not believe in things. I believe in relationships.

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

The painting is finished when the idea has disappeared.

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 from the beholder instead of bringing them within his reach as painting should.

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.

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

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.

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.

With age, art and life become one.

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.

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.

A painting without something disturbing in it – what's that?.

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

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

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.

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

I do not believe in objects. I believe only in their relationships.

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.

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.