Georges Braque Quotations

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

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

Painting is a nail to which I fasten my ideas.

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

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

I am much more interested in achieving unison with nature than in copying it.

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 do not believe in objects. I believe only in their relationships.

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.

La ve rite existe; on n'invente que le mensonge. Truth exists; only lies are invented.

It is the unforeseeable that creates the event.

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.

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

Out of limitations, new forms emerge

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.

In art there is only one thing that counts: the bit that cannot be explained.

I have made a great discovery. I no longer believe in anything.

Never join an organization.

Colour could give rise to sensations which would interfere with our conception of space.

Whatever is valuable in painting is precisely what one is incapable of talking about.

I am interposing overlaid planes a short way off... To make it understood that things are in front of each other instead of being scattered in space.

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.

Evidence exhausts the truth.

I couldn't portray a woman in all her natural loveliness... I haven't the skill. No one has. I must, therefore, create a new sort of beauty...

I do not believe in things. I believe in relationships.

Art disturbs, science reassures.

The function of Art is to disturb. Science reassures.

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.

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

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

I like the rule that corrects emotion.

We will never have repose. The present is perpetual.

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.

One must not imitate what one wants to create.

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.

A painting without something disturbing in it – what's that?.

In a painting, what counts is the unexpected.

Writing is not describing, painting is not depicting. Verisimilitude is merely an illusion.

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

Scientific perspective forces the objects in a picture to disappear away from the beholder instead of bringing them within his reach as painting should.

Poetry is to a painting what life is to man.

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...

Perspective 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...

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 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.

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.

There is more sensitivity in technique than in the rest of the picture.

Whatever is in common is true; but likeness is false.

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

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.

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.

It is the limitation of means that determines style, gives rise to new forms and makes creativity possible.

To work from nature is to improvise.

I wanted to create a kind of substance by means of brush-work. But that is the kind of discovery which one makes gradually... Thus it was that I subsequently began to introduce sand, sawdust and metal filings into my pictures.

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...

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.

Colour acts simultaneously with form, but has nothing to do with form.

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...

Art upsets, science reasures.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Truth exists, only falsehood has to be invented.

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

With age, art and life become one.

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.

Art is meant to disturb. Science reassures.

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

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

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

Art is made to trouble but science reassures.

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.

Art is polymorphic. A picture appears to each onlooker under a different guise.

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.

The painting is finished when the idea has disappeared.

Art is a wound turned into light.

Truth exists; only lies are invented.