Great Throughts Treasury

"Truth exists, only lies have to be invented."

"Art is meant to upset people, science reassures them."

"Reality only reveals itself when it is illuminated by a ray of poetry"

"Art is made to disturb, science reassures. "

"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."

"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. I thought that from the moment someone else could do the same as myself, there was no difference between the pictures and they should not be signed. Afterwards I realized it was not so and began to sign my pictures again. Picasso had begun again anyhow. 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.."

"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."

"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."

"I felt dissatisfied with traditional perspective. Merely a mechanical process, this perspective never conveys things in full. It starts from one viewpoint and never gets away from it. But the viewpoint is quite unimportant. It is though someone were to draw profiles all his life, leading people to think that a man has only one eye.. ..When one got to thinking like that, everything changed, you cannot imagine how much!"

"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."

"I like the rule that corrects emotion."

"Illusions ... are simple facts, but they have been created by the mind, by the spirit, and they are one of the justifications of the new spatial configuration."

"In art, progress lies not in an extension, but in a knowledge of limitations."

"In Art there is only one thing that counts; the thing you can't explain."

"If I have called Cubism a new order, it is without any revolutionary ideas or any reactionary ideas...One cannot escape form one’s own epoch, however revolutionary one may be. 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.. ..If there is a touch of reaction, since life imposes that, it is minute. And then it is so difficult to judge a thing historically, separated from its environment: it is the relationship between a man and what he does that counts. That’s what good and touches us."

"Limited means often constitute the charm and force of primitive painting. Extension, on the contrary, leads the arts to decadence."

"Nature is a mere pretext for a decorative composition, plus sentiment. It suggests emotion, and I translate that emotion into art."

"It is the unforeseeable that creates the event."

"Never join an organization."

"It is not sufficient that what one paints should be made visible. It must be made tangible."

"One has to arrive at a specific temperature, at which the objects become malleable."

"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."

"Perspective is a ghastly mistake which it has taken four centuries to redress."

"Once an object has been incorporated in a picture it accepts a new destiny."

"Progress in art does not consist in reducing limitations, but in knowing them better."

"Thanks to the oval I have discovered the meaning of the horizontal and the vertical."

"Painting is a nail to which I fashion my ideas."

"The space between the dish and the pitcher, that I paint also."

"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."

"To define a thing is to substitute the definition for the thing itself."

"The painting is finished when the idea has disappeared."

"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."

"To work from nature is to improvise."

"We must not imitate that which we seek to create."

"There is only one valuable thing in art: the thing you cannot explain."

"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 life’s, because in nature there is a tactile, I would almost say a manual space. I wrote about this moreover ‘When a still-life is no longer within reach, it ceases to be a still-life.. ..For me that expressed the desire I have always had to touch a thing, not just to look at it. It was that space that attracted me strongly, for that was the earliest Cubist painting – the quest for space."

"We will never have repose. The present is perpetual."

"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."

"With age, art and life become one."

"Work to perfect the mind. There is no certitude but in what the mind conceives."

"You see, 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 or 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."