Picasso Quotations

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.

If they were starting their careers today, Rockwell and Picasso would probably both be painting on black velvet.

You don't have to be Picasso or Rembrandt to create something. The fun of it, the joy of creating, is way high above anything else to do with the art form.

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

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.

I think my most famous was 'Poco's Legend.' It's a white album with a simple line drawing of a horse. It almost has a Picasso feel to it. I remember that Rusty Young, the lead singer of the band, said, 'I want you to draw a horse for the song 'Legend,' which is about a phantom spirit horse. I want you to do it in several lines.'

Picasso is what is going to happen and what is happening; he is posterity and archaic time, the distant ancestor and our next-door neighbor. Speed permits him to be two places at once, to belong to all the centuries without letting go of the here and now.

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.

I remember my mother taking me to see the Picasso show in the 1940s, and I was impressed by the life and vibrancy of it all. It was a bit too avant-garde for most Londoners at the time, but since then, the city has become a centre for modern culture.

I don't happen to approve of plastic surgery. I think God put plastic surgeons on this earth for good reasons - people get burned or people might have a nose like Pinocchio and that has to be fixed. But to just chop yourself up to look a few years younger? You could come out looking like a Picasso picture.

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

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.

We didn't want just another Picasso exhibition. We wanted something that would link the work to a particular context.

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

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.

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.

He was interested in the ritualistic aspect of African art. African art, like Picasso's art, is not about describing things, but about conveying the idea of things and people. The influence of African art on Picasso can be seen in the works he produced from 1907-9.

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.

Remember that the '60s was up against the best American art that anyone had produced, and probably the best international art of the 20th century, minus Picasso and Matisse. But who was going to be as good as Barnett Newman and Clyfford Still? Maybe we weren't, but there was a lot of variety and a lot of trying.

Picasso was hugely innovative, and, wow, did he have facility, amazing ability, but I don't think he painted a masterpiece.

Picasso never copied African art, which is why this show does not match a specific African work with a Picasso. He took its point of view to express his own art. In his drawings we can see three sketched antelopes which come very close to the Bambara sculptures of antelopes. But then he creates a metamorphosis in which he creates something phenomenal and new.

I'm 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.

We wanted to create a dialogue between Picasso and African art.

Braque was like some hilltop castle that Picasso was constantly besieging. He invests it, bombards it, mines it, assaults it - and each time the smoke clears, the castle is as solid as ever.

There's not one artist who hasn't been influenced by Picasso somewhere in their lifetime, if only to vault over him as this massive figure. You can't be in the 20th century and not be influenced by Picasso in some way or another.

The UN is not just a product of do-gooders. It is harshly real. The day will come when men will see the U.N. and what it means clearly. 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.

I've always said I'll take the ugly win to the Picasso loss any day of the week. It's within our grasap. If we were being out-physicaled or just weren't good enough, that would be the discouraging part. But that's not the case with this ballclub. We're just having lapses at crucial times.

It's a five-color crayon drawing done in 1963 when Picasso was 76-years-old. It's one of his favorite subjects: A Picador in a bullfight.

In his later years Pablo Picasso was not allowed to roam an art unattended, for he had previously been discovered in the act of trying to improve on one of his old masterpieces.

In Chicago, we may not think the Picasso presiding over the Richard J. Daley Center plaza is art, but we know it's a big Picasso and it's the city's Picasso, and when the Cubs made the play-offs, the sculpture wore a baseball cap just like everything else.

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.

The likelihood that an investor might be able to randomly pick the next Picasso -- that's a lot like buying a lottery ticket and hoping to win big. You have no real data here on what the average return is from a random purchase of art.

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 Never permit a dichotomy to rule your life, a dichotomy in which you hate what you do so you can have pleasure in your spare time. Look for a situation in which your work will give you as much happiness as your spare time.