Top 308 Picasso Quotes & Sayings - Page 3
Explore popular Picasso quotes.
Last updated on April 15, 2025.
The function of the artist is the mythologization of the culture and the world. In the visual arts there were two men whose work handled mythological themes in a marvelous way: Paul Klee and Pablo Picasso.
It evoked Picasso and Miles Davis for me — two great artists who totally indulged themselves in their work and who they were, but they certainly didn't give a damn what other people thought.
Picasso says that an artists paints not to ask a question but because he has found something and he wants to share—he cannot help it—what he has found.
Picasso only registers the deformities which have not yet penetrated our consciousness. Art is a mirror which goes 'fast' like a watch - sometimes.
When Picasso paints as a cubist, putting one tone next to another, the arrangement of planes is fine and the results very storng. But those who imitate him achieve nothing worthwhile.
Picasso could use everyone's paintings and transform them into his own. He was using ideas from all of his contemporaries.
Bitcoin, in the short or even long term, may turn out be a good investment in the same way that anything that is rare can be considered valuable. Like baseball cards. Or a Picasso.
I don't own any of my own paintings because a Picasso original costs several thousand dollars and that's a luxury I cannot afford.
The cubism of Braque or Picasso, the dissonant compositions of Schoenberg or Stravinsky, the free-flowing and often erotic choreography of Isadora Duncan and Nijinsky - these were acts of rebellion against the certainties and traditions of the old world.
Pablo Picasso said, "Art is the lie that tells the truth," and it's not a terribly radical statement. It's always been that you can tell truth through fiction. And this idea also comes from nuclear physics.
Like Picasso, I go through blue periods, green periods, or grey periods.
I couldn't see his face, because the light came in from behind him and he was in shadow, and he said, "I am Picasso." And I said, "Well, so what?
Everything will be all right - you know when? When people, just people, stop thinking of the United Nations as a weird Picasso abstraction and see it as a drawing they made themselves.
My mother said to me, 'If you are a soldier, you will become a general. If you are a monk, you will become the Pope.' Instead, I was a painter, and became Picasso.
After Stalin died, the Soviet Union began inching toward the world again. The ban on jazz was lifted. Ernest Hemingway was published; the Pushkin Museum in Moscow hosted an exhibit of the works of Picasso.
Picasso has a volatile, explosive presence. He seems to take art back to an earlier function, before the centuries of museums and masterpieces; he is the artist as clown, as conjurer, as master funmaker.
My eyes are at different levels, and my right ear's a bit bigger than my left - which showed up particularly in school photographs - so my mother used to call me her 'little Picasso.'
Picasso painted with passion, Mozart composed with it. A child plays with it all day long. You may think you’ve lost your passion, or that you can’t identify it, or that you have so much of it, it threatens to overwhelm you. None of these is true.
I'm a sponge, the more I absorb, the more I am able to articulate my vision, as artists do, like Picasso. I'm an artist in that light. I went from being an artist to an artiste.
If surrealism ever comes to adopt a particular line of moral conduct, it has only to accept the discipline that Picasso has accepted and will continue to accept.
I love the song 'Picasso Baby,' and I think the performance art piece was brilliant. I love that fact that Jay Z is continuing to raise the bar on hip hop.
Only once in a thousand years or so do we get to hear a Mozart or see a Picasso or read a Shakespeare. Ali was one of them, and yet at his heart, he was still a kid from Louisville who ran with the gods and walked with the crippled and smiled at the foolishness of it all.
Poetry' is what distinguishes the cubist paintings Picasso and I arrived at intuitively from the lifeless sort of painting those who followed us tried, with such unfortunate results, to arrive at theoretically.
Our artistic heroes tend to be those self-exercisers, like Picasso, and Nabokov, and Wallace Stevens, who rather defiantly kept playing past dark.
Im sick of the foodies who need every morsel that goes into their mouth to be a Picasso painting, a Giacometti sculpture, a Proust novel, evoking the world with each crumb.
I am not an intellectual. An intellectual is someone who looks at a sausage and thinks of Picasso, whereas I just say 'pass the mustard'.
My heroes are people like Picasso and Miro and people who at last really reach something in their old age, which they absolutely couldn't ever have done in their youth.
Once, Picasso was asked what his paintings meant. He said, “Do you ever know what the birds are singing? You don’t. But you listen to them anyway.” So, sometimes with art, it is important just to look.
Look at Picasso. O’Neill. Tennessee Williams. Capote. Were these shiny happy people spreading sunshine? No. Only the greatest of personal demons can force you to do powerful work.
I wanted to paint in a folk-artist-y way. My heroes were Van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse, and Rembrandt. I think Picasso is about as a modern as I got. But I incorporated things that they rejected as well as movements that happened later.
Picasso had nicknamed Georges Braque "Wilbur," thereby becoming "Orville" in their Wright Brothers-like ambition to get painting off the ground of conventional representation.
It took me six years to get close to Picasso. I learnt a lot from him, and he was an absolute genius. He almost became my grandfather at the time. It was like he was a magician or something.
For me, Picasso was the ultimate man. He taught me that photography is all about how you approach an image: what you do and what you don't do. He inspired me to go beyond what you think is in front of you.
If I say 'Find me an interesting painting' to Google, someday a robot could go around the Picasso museum and take a picture for me.
Raising a child is a little like Picasso's work; in the beginning he did very conventional representational things. Cubism came after he had the rules down pat.
Picasso had a saying - 'good artists copy, great artists steal' - and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.
Picasso was a delightful, kindly, friendly, simple little man. When I met him he was extremely excited and overjoyed that his mother-in-law had just died, and he was looking forward to the funeral.
Picasso is a character that has pursued me for a long time and I always rejected. He deserves a lot of respect because I am from Malaga, and I was born four blocks from where he was born.
For me, acting is all about the aesthetic. I just want to keep honing my craft. Not that I'm taking myself too seriously, but every artist should consider himself Picasso. Otherwise, you're doing yourself an injustice.
When the painting is hanging on your wall for a long time, you don't notice it. You get tired of it, even if it's a Picasso. When the next generation inherits the painting, they sell it. I don't want to be sold.
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.
A painter like Picasso, who runs through many periods and phases, ends up by saying all those things which are on the tip of the tongue of the age to say, and finally sterilizes the originality of his contemporaries and juniors.
I do not believe in God, yet I believe in Picasso.
When I think of competition it's like I try to create against the past. I think about Michelangelo and Picasso, you know, the pyramids.
People say, 'Oh, to be the daughter of Picasso!' But it's not as extravagant as it seems. He was very special, very vibrant, but he was my father. I didn't have another.
Now people look at 'The Scream' or Van Gogh's 'Irises' or a Picasso and see its new content: money. Auction houses inherently equate capital with value.
Computers let people avoid people, going out to explore. It's so different to just open a website instead of looking at a Picasso in a museum in Paris.
Picasso didn't stop painting when he was 41 years old because he felt he wasn't relevant, but he kept going and the painting he made before he died are now worth 40 million dollars.
Me sitting down for dinner with Ingmar Bergman felt like a house painter sitting down with Picasso.
There's no denying that Caruso came with a voice?that Beethoven came with music in his soul, Picasso was drawing like an angel in the crib.You're born with it.
What a model of an artist was for me was an artist who worked. Picasso was the ultimate model, because the work ethic he had.
What a Beethoven, Shakespeare or Picasso has done is not create something, so much as they have accessed that place within themselves from which they could express that which has been created by God.
High tech is for a short time. But art is forever. People still admire a Picasso or a Van Gogh. But they don't admire the steam locomotive anymore.
A home is not a museum. It doesn't have to be furnished with Picasso paintings, or Sheraton suites, or Oriental rugs, or Chinese pottery. But it does have to be furnished with things that mean something to you.
Picasso said, 'Art is a lie that tells the truth.' What if you just want to tell the truth and not lie about it?
More than anything else, I'd like to be an old man with a good face, like Hitchcock or Picasso.
I once had the nerve to ask Picasso the question, 'What is art?' He answered, 'Art is a lie which makes us see the truth.
Picasso said art is a lie that tells the truth. What if you just want to tell the truth and not lie about it?
When I was 13 years old, I went to visit my aunt and uncle in Washington, D.C., and they just deposited me at the National Gallery. I would go from Rembrandt to Picasso - I remember that experience so vividly.
Since childhood, it was my dream to go where all the poets and artists had been. Rimbaud, Artaud, Brancusi, Camus, Picasso, Bresson, Goddard, Jeanne Moreau, Juliette Greco, everybody - Paris for me was a Mecca.