Paradise is to love many things with a passion.
Reality is to be found in lightness and darkness.
When you see what you express through photography, you realize all the things that can no longer be the objectives of painting. Why should an artist persist in treating subjects that can be established so clearly with the lens of a camera?
Paintings are but research and experiment. I never do a painting as a work of art. All of them are researches. I search constantly and there is a logical sequence in all this research.
A good picture, any picture, has to be bristling with razor blades.
People don’t realize what they have when they own a picture by me. Each picture is a phial with my blood. That is what has gone into it.
If you take my sayings and explode them in the air, they remain only sayings. But if you fit them together in their correct places, you will have the whole story.
If everyone would paint, political re-education would be unnecessary.
Painting isn’t a question of sensibility; it’s a matter of seizing the power, taking over from nature, not expecting her to supply you with information and good advice.
I must keep on trying, just to keep the experiment going until I get tired of it all. Even if the last result is not necessarily the best, I stop when my interest in the problem wanes.
I go for a walk in the forest of Fontainebleau. I get ‘green’ indigestion. I must get rid of this sensation into a picture. Green rules it. A painter paints to unload himself of feelings and visions.
Why should I copy this owl, this sea urchin? Why should I try to imitate nature? I might just as well try to trace a perfect circle.
To me there is no past or future in art. If a work of art does not live in the present, it must not be considered at all.
From the point of view of art, there are no concrete or abstract forms, but only forms which are more or less convincing lies.
Let them understand above all that the artist works from necessity; that he, too, is a minute element of the world to whom one should ascribe no more importance than so many things in nature which charm us but which we do not explain to ourselves.
The only pictorial matter that is of interest to me is the matter and sentiments brought about by the work itself.
You see these thick curtains shut out the daylight: artificial light suits me a great deal better; it’s absolutely steady, and much more exciting.
If you have five elements available use only four. If you have four elements use three.
If I paint a hammer and sickle people may think it is a representation of Communism, but for me it is only a hammer and sickle. I just want to reproduce the objects for what they are, not for what they mean.
There’s no such thing as a bad Picasso, but some are less good than others.