Socialists

"incluso su firma es una obra de arte."

"even his signature is a work of art."

"As a little female kid in Ohio, It was hard to identify with Picasso: his life with his babes And my life with my cat were rather different."

"Dora Maar is always being referred to as Picasso’s lover, and actually what I want to do is scream and say Dora Maar was an incredible street photographer and Surrealist, and she was amazing. But how often does her name come up in telling his story?"

"..[Picasso had] a depth of understanding and insight into the inwardness of things.. ..doing very exceptional things of a most abstract psychic nature.."

"There's no doubt but that without this liberté, égalité and fraternité there could not have been a Monet, Modigliani, Picasso, or Giacometti."

"...they [Picasso and Georges Braque ] began working together, each understood and accepted the perspectival ambiguity implicit in Cézanne's colored planes, which they saw as acting simultaneously in two different positions: one an illusion, a colored equivalent for the position of the natural object in depth, the other actual, as an area for color on the surface of the picture."

"I have in front of me photographs of all Picasso’s best works. The mere I admire them the further I feel myself removed from all art, it seems so easy, so limited! We are part of the world creation, and we ourselves create nothing."

"I was with Cézanne for a long time, and now naturally I am with Picasso."

"Picasso - never at a loss for words: 'What do you think an artist is? An imbecile who has nothing but eyes if he is a painter, or ears if he is a musician, or a lyre at every level of his heart if he is a poet...Quite the contrary, he is at the same time a political being, constantly aware of what goes on in the world, whether it be harrowing, bitter or sweet, and he cannot help being shaped by it... painting is not interior decoration. It is an instrument of war for attack and defense against the enemy.'"

"Picasso said, “You can have all the perspectives at once!” What a hero. But tell me, are any of those perspectives a woman’s? Well, then I’m not interested."

"[A]lthough the sculpture made by painters is traditionally regarded as a way of giving material presence to two-dimensional imagery, Picasso was much more concerned with dematerilization, and the possibility of creating "non-space," in both mediums. This issue was especially germane to Picasso's sculpture, and it is also a crucial element of his Painter and Model. ...Picasso ...aspired to a very different type of spatial construction, literally creating a visual "nothingness." Such ideas were no longer Cubist ...but rather were ways of creating signs not simply for things but also for paradoxes—for contradictions as well as for assertions, for states of suspension and nonbeing as well as for being."

"Because of his extraordinary technical virtuosity, Picasso was able effectively and convincingly to employ conflicting styles at will... another instance of his uncommon sensitivity to the arbitrariness of different languages. ...[H]e was probably the first Western artist to insist willfully and persistently on the relative arbitrariness of the means of pictorial representation. Indeed, this... is one of the most original and radical aspects of his entire career. Artists of the previous generation, such as Cézanne and van Gogh, had employed systematic "distortions" in their works, but... as part of a... direct way of communicating the "truth" of his own personal vision. Picasso's contemporaries, including Matisse, followed in that tradition."

"Picasso is taking Cézanne's elements - the cone, cylinder and sphere - into Cubism. Matisse is taking Cézanne's interest in the wholeness and the clarity of figures. They're taking almost opposite interpretations of what they see in Cézanne: Picasso is understanding it as decomposition, and Matisse is understanding it as composition."

"People talk of Picasso as the leader of the Cubists but, strictly speaking, he is no longer a Cubist. Today he is a Cubist, tomorrow he will be something else. The only true Cubists are Gleizes and Metzinger."

"Outside the Fauve circle, other artists in Paris were taking new and radical approaches to art as well during 1905 and 1906. New influences were circulating in the city. For example, Andre Derain acquired a Negro mask from his friend De Vlaminck. He presented it, with special excitement to Henri Matisse and to a younger artist, Pablo Picasso. In early 1906, Picasso began his studies leading to 'w:Les Demoiselles d' Avignon', the first exploration of the emerging Cubist idiom."

"Picasso es pintor, yo también; Picasso es español, yo también; Picasso es comunista, yo tampoco."

"I had this gorgeous hair and, like Coco Chanel, I used to tailor a man's shirt or jacket to fit me. I was like an iceberg. You couldn't get close to me. They didn't dare come near me, the men. That was why Picasso was intrigued [1954].. ..I was terrified he'd ask me to pose in the nude but he was very sensitive to this. He saw I didn't like myself and wanted to know why.' [she did not tell him.] That's why he painted me like that.. [The curators asked her, 'Why no mouth?:] 'Oh, I didn't speak much.'"

"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 form the beholder instead of bringing them within his reach as painting should."

"If we had never met Picasso, would Cubism have been what it is? I think not. The meeting with Picasso was a circumstance in our lives."

"When we were so friendly with Picasso, there was a time when we had difficulty in recognizing our own pictures. Later, when the revelation went deeper, differences appeared. Revelation is the one thing that cannot be taken from you. But before the revelation took place, there was still a marked intention of carrying painting in a direction that could re-establish the bond between Picasso and ourselves."

"At that time I was very friendly with Picasso. Our temperaments were very different, but we had the same idea. Later on it became clear, Picasso is Spanish and I am French; as everyone knows that mean a lot of differences, but during those days the differences did not count... .We were living in Montmarte, we used to meet every day, we used to talk... In those years Picasso and I said things to each other that nobody will ever say again, that nobody could say any more... .It was rather like a pair of climbers roped together."

"Well, I looked at Picasso (at the Picasso exhibition in New York, Museum of Modern Art in 1939) until I could smell his armpits and the cigarette smoke on his breast. Finally, in front of one picture – a bone figure on a beach – I got it. I saw that the figure was not his real subject. The plasticity wasn't either – although the plasticity was great. No. Picasso had uncovered a feverishness in himself and is painting it – a feverishness of death and beauty."

"I don't try to be prophetic, as I don't sit down to write literature. It is simply this: a writer has to take all the risks of putting down what he sees. No one can tell him about that. No one can control that reality. It reminds me of something Pablo Picasso was supposed to have said to Gertrude Stein while he was painting her portrait. Gertrude said, "I don't look like that." And Picasso replied. "You will." And he was right."

"we are not gladiators. But there is something we are committed to of fundamental importance, something everybody should be committed to. We are committed to the process of changing our position in the world. This is what our literature is about. There is a certain position assigned to me in the world, assigned to him (James Baldwin) in the world, and we are saying we are not satisfied with that position. This is important to me-to everybody. I think you see it is important to me. You may not see that it is important to you but it is. We want to create the new man. Mankind tries all kinds of ways, all kinds of solutions; some of them leading that far and no farther and it is wise that we try something else. We have followed your way and it seems there is a little problem at this point. And so we are offering a new aesthetic. There is nothing wrong with that...Picasso did that. In 1904 he saw that Western art had run out of breath so he went to the Congo-the dispised Congo-and brought out a new art. Don't mind what he was saying before he died: that much is entirely his business. But he borrowed something which saved his art. And we are telling you what we think will save your art. We think we are right, but even if we are wrong it doesn't matter. It couldn't be worse than it is now."

"No. It took me sixty years to draw that."

"If they took away all my paints, I'd use pastels, if they took away my pastels, I'd use crayons, if they took away my crayons, I'd use a pencil. If they put me in a cell, and stripped me of everything, I'd spit on my finger and draw on the wall."

"The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls."

"Yo no busco, yo encuentro."

"Good artists copy, great artists steal."

"Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up."

"The urge to destroy is also a creative urge."

"I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it."

"It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child."

"People want to find a 'meaning' in everything and everyone. That's the disease of our age, an age that is anything but practical but believes itself to be more practical than any other age."

"La inspiración existe, pero tiene que encontrarte trabajando."

"Their forms had no more influence on me than they did on Matisse. Or Derain. But for them, the masks were sculptures like all others. When Matisse showed me his first African head, he spoke to me of Egyptian art."

"People who try to explain pictures are usually barking up the wrong tree."

"I begin with an idea and then it becomes something else. After all, what is a painter? He is a collector who gets what he likes in others by painting them himself. This is how I begin and then it becomes something else."

"You mustn't alway believe what I say", he once told me. "Questions tempt you to tell lies, particularly when there is no answer."

"For a long time I limited myself to one colour — as a form of discipline."

"For me, art has neither past nor future. All I have ever made was for the present."

"I treat paintings as I treat objects. If a window in a picture looks wrong, I close it and draw the curtains, just as I would do in my own room."

"I do not see why so much importance should be attached to the idea of 'research' in painting."

"To find is the thing."

"Nothing can be accomplished without solitude; I have made a kind of solitude for myself."

"I don't know where he [ Marc Chagall ] gets those images; he must have an angel in his head."

"Drink to me. Drink to my health. You know I can't drink any more."

"Success is dangerous. One begins to copy oneself and to copy oneself is more dangerous than to copy others."

"To contradict. To show one eye full face and one in profile. Nature does many things the way I do, but she hides them! My painting is a series of non-sequiturs. ..."