Pablo Picasso Quotes about Art - Page 3

If I knew what the meaning of art was, I wouldn't tell you.

I don't say everything, but I paint everything.

Art is not chaste. Those ill prepared should be allowed no contact with art. Art is dangerous. If it is chaste, it is not art.

All art is subversive.

I don't believe in accidents. There are only encounters in history. There are no accidents.

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.

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.

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

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.

To me there is no past or future in my 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 than it ever was.

I consider a work of art as a product of calculations, calculations that are frequently unknown to the author himself.

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.

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.

I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.

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

To me there is no past or future in art. If a work of art does not live in the present, it must not be considered at all.

The urge to destroy is also a creative urge.

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

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.

Sculpture is the art of the intelligence.

The painter goes through states of fullness and evaluation. That is the whole secret of art.

Art is a lie that makes us realize truth.

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.

Bad artists copy. Good artists steal.

I begin with an idea and then it becomes something else.