Picasso Quotes

Pablo Picasso would paint a painting and hang it on the wall, and you would go and see the painting exactly how he wanted it to be made. But if you have an idea for a TV show, for example, you’re beholden to studios to produce it and distributors to distribute it.

You don’t buy a Picasso because you love the frame.

Would you ask Picasso to explain ‘Guernica?’ Would you ask Nabokov to explain ‘Lolita?’ Would you ask Tolstoy about ‘War and Peace?’ No, you wouldn’t dare.

Nobody taught Picasso how to paint – he learned for himself. And nobody can teach you to be a producer. You can learn the mechanics, but you can’t learn what’s right about a script or a director or an actor. That comes from instinct and intuition. It comes from inside you.

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 cubism began to take a social form, Metzinger was especially talked about. He explained cubism, while Picasso never explained anything. It took a few years to see that not talking was better than talking too much.

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.

The first half of the 20th century belongs to Picasso, and the second half is about photography. They said digital would kill photography because everyone can do it, but they said that about the box brownie in 1885 when it came out. It makes photography interesting because everyone thinks they can take a picture.

What if Picasso had gone to the Moon? Or Andy Warhol or Michael Jackson or John Lennon? What about Coco Chanel? These are all artists that I adore.

Like Picasso, I go through blue periods, green periods, or grey periods.

I don’t think there is any question that Picasso is the greatest figure of the 20th century.

I came down successfully through Picasso and Braque, down through Pollock, I guess, but I began to stop at Franz Kline and the Abstractionists. I like their design, brilliant design, marvelous color layers. But I don’t find any human content there. I’m from an old school, and painting has to have human content for me.

There is a constant ebb and flow in art historical reputations. The reputation of even the greatest figures like Picasso are in flux.

‘Le Reve’ may be one of the three best pictures Pablo Picasso ever painted.

Picasso said, ‘Art is a lie that tells the truth.’ What if you just want to tell the truth and not lie about it?

You can take things that Jimi Hendrix took, from Curtis Mayfield or from Buddy Guy for example, because we are all children of everything, even Picasso. But if you want to stand out, you have to learn to crystallize your existence and create your own fingerprints.

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.

I look at people like Picasso and Da Vinci and Escher and Miles Davis, and they’ll write or paint that one definitive masterpiece of maybe 50 that they have that’s really trying to go outside the box, trying to do something that’s tough. And then when you accomplish it, you look back and go, ‘Yeeaaaah – masterpiece.’

I didn’t really start appreciating Picasso until a few years back. I didn’t like him at all. But now I can see this world is crazy.

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.

When I was a child, my mother said to me, ‘If you become a soldier, you’ll be a general. If you become a monk, you’ll end up as the Pope.’ Instead, I became a painter and wound up as Picasso.

Pablo Picasso, Frank Sinatra, Ernest Hemingway, Mel Gibson, Lou Reed, Norman Mailer, Vanessa Redgrave, Van Morrison – each is distinguished by controversies unrelated to his or her art; by many accounts, some of them are not nice people at all.

I thought it would be very nice to become Picasso or Rembrandt, or a van Gogh.

As hard as I try I cannot get myself to three museums in any one city. The only museum I’ve ever really enjoyed was the Picasso Museum in Barcelona and I think that’s because it’s small and you can touch things.

You see Michelangelo and Picasso and you read literature. I had some innate inchoate yearning for that, but I never really saw where I would fit in. That’s called art. And then something happened to pop music, which is that it became art under the hand of the Beatles, the Stones, and Bob Dylan and some other people.

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.

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.

I really think that if I had met Picasso during peacetime, nothing would have happened.

There is a relationship between cartooning and people like Mir= and Picasso which may not be understood by the cartoonist, but it definitely is related even in the early Disney.

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.

Picasso said once when being interviewed that one should not be one’s own connoisseur.

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 was literally told for ‘The Show Goes On’ that I shouldn’t rap too deep. I shouldn’t be too lyrical. It just needs to be something easy on the eyes. Like a record company telling Picasso that we don’t need these abstract interpretations of life, where people have to sit down and look at it and break it down.

When you see the best of the best – when you see a Matisse or a Picasso – what interests you is the creativity and harmony.

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.

The most evil person I ever met was a toss-up between Pablo Picasso and the publisher-crook Robert Maxwell.

We would get 20 different angles and then cut them all together. That’s what I called it at the time – the ‘cubistic’ treatment of shooting football. It was the same thing Picasso did except we did it with a football play. It’s taking a single image and looking at it from multiple perspectives.

That freedom that Picasso afforded himself, to be an artist in a huge number of ways, seems to be a huge psychological liberation.

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.

When I was 12, I wrote a list of things to do before I died. ‘Own a Picasso’ was one of those things.

Turns out Picasso’s passion for uncertainty, mystery, and the thrill of life never ended.

Picasso’s always been such a huge influence that I thought when I started the cartoon paintings that I was getting away from Picasso, and even my cartoons of Picasso were done almost to rid myself of his influence.

I love the work of Matisse and Picasso, but I don’t have enough millions to own one. And I don’t really believe in owning art, anyway.

Pablo Picasso first entered my consciousness when I was a boy of about eight years old.

Our farm is a 15-minute walk to Pablo Picasso’s last home. Alongside it stands the lovely Notre-Dame-de-Vie Chapel with its 13th-century bell tower, which was visible to Pablo from his atelier.

When Picasso painted in Paris, was he a Spanish or a French painter? It does not matter, he was Picasso, whatever the influences surrounding him. He simply chose Paris because it was the ideal place for him to sell his creation.

I think Picasso was someone who took art’s powers of consuming, its powers of much-ness and multiplicity, and used that to his fullest extent. That’s something that was permitted to men, obviously, much more than women, but was also permitted in the past much more often than now.

Our artistic heroes tend to be those self-exercisers, like Picasso, and Nabokov, and Wallace Stevens, who rather defiantly kept playing past dark.

I doubt Picasso ever painted a picture in an hour, he took his time, looked at every detail and made sure it was perfect.

Sometimes it works. Sometimes I feel like playing ‘Hospital‘. Sometimes I feel like playing ‘Pablo Picasso’. I’ve been playing a lot lately. I do it as long as I feel like it.

There’s a point where art is not subjective, and my example for that is Picasso. If you don’t like Picasso, that’s your problem.

You have to be creative. It’s the basics. You can’t be Picasso unless you know how to draw a real face; then you can turn it upside down.

By making pictures, you learn the many different properties of photography. I use those properties differently than, say, an advertising agency would, but we’re both operating in the same reality. A face painted by Picasso occupies the same reality as a portrait by Stieglitz.

I’m lucky enough and wealthy enough to be able to buy photographs and buy art that inspires me from day to day. I don’t want a Picasso on my wall; it’s great art, but it’s dead art to me. I’d rather have a photograph by someone I’ve never heard of that really inspires me.

I don’t write for a particular audience. I work as an artist, and I think the audience of one, which is the self, and I have to satisfy myself as an artist. So I always say that I write for the same people that Picasso painted for. I think he painted for himself.

I think Picasso is more feminine than Matisse.

Art is about imagination. When you look at a picture from Salvador Dali, that’s about imagination. When you look at Picasso, that’s about imagination. Doing stuff from your heart.

I sort of had that fantasy of being one of the muses of Paris and hanging out with Toulouse Lautrec and Picasso.

Let’s look at people as artists and try to support them; just because Picasso painted a couple of bad paintings, that’s no reason to say he’s a lousy painter.

I went to the big Picasso retrospective at the Tate in the sixties, and I think I went to an Andy Warhol retrospective at the Tate in the sixties, too. My mother was very good at taking me to things like that. We lived in Reading, but we went on these cultural trips to London.

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 his pink period and his blue period. I am in my blonde period right now.

Valentino made my day suit for the wedding of Paloma Picasso in Paris.

A high-brow is someone who looks at a sausage and thinks of Picasso.

I always dreamed of working in Paris, of going to the Coupole and slapping Picasso or Giacometti on the shoulder.