Pablo Picasso Quotes about Art - Page 4

Painting is stronger than me, it makes me do it's bidding.

Everything is a miracle. It is a miracle that one does not dissolve in one's bath like a lump of sugar.

From the point of view of art, there are no concrete or abstract forms, but only forms which are more or less convincing lies.

Enough of Art. It's Art that kills us. People no longer want to do painting: they make art.

Through art we express our conception of what nature is not.

Museums are just a lot of lies, and the people who make art their business are mostly imposters. We have infected the pictures in museums with all our stupidities, all our mistakes, all our poverty of spirit. We have turned them into petty and ridiculous things.

I try to paint what I have found and not what I look for. In art, intentions are of little importance.

Colors, like features, follow the changes of the emotions.

Art isn't done to decorate apartments, but to wage war against the enemy.

To finish a work? To finish a picture? What nonsense! To finish it means to be through with it, to kill it, to rid it of its soul, to give it its final blow the coup de grace for the painter as well as for the picture.

We might adapt for the artist the joke about there being nothing more dangerous than instruments of war in the hands of generals. In the same way, there is nothing more dangerous than justice in the hands of judges, and a paint brush in the hands of a painter! Just think of the danger to society! But today we haven't the heart to expel the painters and poets because we no longer admit to ourselves that there is any danger in keeping them in our midst.

Art is never chaste. It ought to be forbidden to ignorant innocents, never allowed into contact with those not sufficiently prepared. Yes, art is dangerous. Where it is chaste, it is not art.

Art is a lie that makes us realise truth ... that is given us to understand.

I never calculate. That is why those who do, calculate so much less accurately than I.

I draw like other people bite their nails.

What do you think an artist is? ...he is a political being, constantly aware of the heart breaking, passionate, or delightful things that happen in the world, shaping himself completely in their image. Painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war.

The different styles I have been using in my art must not be seen as an evolution, or as steps towards an unknown ideal of painting. Everything I have ever made was made for the present and with the hope that it would always remain in the present.

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.

This idea of art for art's sake is a hoax.

Everyone wants to understand art. Why don't we try to understand the song of a bird? Why do we love the night, the flowers, everything around us, without trying to understand them? But in the case of a painting, people think they have to understand.

We artists are indestructible; even in a prison, or in a concentration camp, I would be almighty in my own world of art, even if I had to paint my pictures with my wet tongue on the dusty floor of my cell.

It is not what an artist does that counts...but what he is.

People want Art. And they are given it. But the less Art there is in painting the more painting there is.

I'm a joker who has understood his epoch and has extracted all he possibly could from the stupidity, greed and vanity of his contemporaries.

No doubt, it is useful for an artist to know all the forms of art which have preceded or which accompany his. That is a sign of strength if it is a question of looking for a stimulus or recognizing mistakes he must avoid.