Top 81 Quotes & Sayings by Georges Braque
Explore popular quotes and sayings by a French artist Georges Braque.
Last updated on April 14, 2025.
To define a thing is to substitute the definition for the thing itself.
Truth exists; only lies are invented.
There is only one valuable thing in art: the thing you cannot explain.
Art is made to disturb, science reassures.
Painting is a nail to which I fasten my ideas.
Reality only reveals itself when it is illuminated by a ray of poetry.
Once an object has been incorporated in a picture it accepts a new destiny.
Scientific perspective forces the objects in a picture to disappear away from the beholder instead of bringing them within his reach as painting should.
It is the limitation of means that determines style, gives rise to new forms and makes creativity possible.
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.
Whatever is valuable in painting is precisely what one is incapable of talking about.
Truth exists, only falsehood has to be invented.
Perspective is a ghastly mistake which it has taken four centuries to redress.
The space between the dish and the pitcher, that I paint also.
Writing is not describing, painting is not depicting. Verisimilitude is merely an illusion.
I am much more interested in achieving unison with nature than in copying it.
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.
Never join an organization.
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.
I like the rule that corrects emotion.
I realized that one cannot reveal oneself without mannerism, without some evident trace of one's personality. But all the same one should not go too far in that direction.
Limited means often constitute the charm and force of primitive painting. Extension, on the contrary, leads the arts to decadence.
I do not believe in objects. I believe only in their relationships.
We will never have repose. The present is perpetual.
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.
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.
It is not sufficient that what one paints should be made visible. It must be made tangible.
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.
I do not believe in things. I believe in relationships.
The painting is finished when the idea has disappeared.
Art is a wound turned into light.
Art is made to trouble but science reassures.
To work from nature is to improvise.
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.
Art is polymorphic. A picture appears to each onlooker under a different guise.
Art upsets, science reasures.
You put a blob of yellow here, and another at the further edge of the canvas: straight away a rapport is established between them. Colour acts in the way that music does.
I find that it is important to work slowly. Anyone who looks at such a canvas will follow the same path the artist took, and he will experience that it is the path which counts more than the outcome of it, and that the route taken has been the most interesting part.
One must not imitate what one wants to create.
Poetry is to a painting what life is to man.
It is the unforeseeable that creates the event.
Thanks to the oval I have discovered the meaning of the horizontal and the vertical.
In art, progress lies not in an extension, but in a knowledge of limitations.
In a painting, what counts is the unexpected.
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.
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.
Whatever is in common is true; but likeness is false.
Critics should help people see for themselves; they should never try to define things, or impose their own explanations, though I admit that if... a critic's explanations serve to increase the general obscurity, that's all to the good.
I considered that the painter's personality should be kept out of things, and therefore pictures should be anonymous. It was I who decided that pictures should not be signed, and for a time Picasso did the same.
With age, art and life become one.
I do not think my painting has ever been revolutionary. It was not directed against any kind of painting. I have never wanted to prove that I was right and someone else wrong.
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.
I have made a great discovery. I no longer believe in anything.
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.
If I have called Cubism a new order, it is without any revolutionary ideas or any reactionary ideas... One cannot escape from one's own epoch, however revolutionary one may be.
Out of limitations, new forms emerge
A painting without something disturbing in it – what's that?.
Emotion should not be rendered by an excited trembling; it can neither be added on nor be imitated. It is the seed, the work is the flower.
Take the birds which you'll have noticed in so many of my recent paintings. I never thought them up, they just materialized of their own accord; they were born on the canvas... it is absurd to read any sort of symbolic significance into them.
In art there is only one thing that counts: the bit that cannot be explained.
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