Georges Braque Quotes about Art

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.

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.

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.

In art there is only one thing that counts: the bit that cannot be explained.

In art, progress lies not in an extension, but in a knowledge of limitations.

Art is polymorphic. A picture appears to each onlooker under a different guise.

Art upsets, science reasures.

Art is made to trouble but science reassures.

To define a thing is to substitute the definition for the thing itself.

It is the unforeseeable that creates the event.

Once an object has been incorporated in a picture it accepts a new destiny.

Painting is a nail to which I fasten my ideas.

One day I noticed that I could go on working my art motif no matter what the weather might be. I no longer needed the sun, for I took my light everywhere with me.

Limited means often constitute the charm and force of primitive painting. Extension, on the contrary, leads the arts to decadence.

The starting point of a picture for any painter is a matter of colors and form...I believe that the poetry of art - if that is what one may call it - is a matter of animating these forms and colors.

One has to guard against a formula that is good for everything, that can interpret reality in addition to the other arts, and that rather than creating can only result in a style, or a stylization.

Art is meant to disturb. Science reassures.

Nature is a mere pretext for a decorative composition, plus sentiment. It suggests emotion, and I translate that emotion into art.