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.
Now people look at ‘The Scream’ or Van Gogh’s ‘Irises’ or a Picasso and see its new content: money. Auction houses inherently equate capital with value.
That freedom that Picasso afforded himself, to be an artist in a huge number of ways, seems to be a huge psychological liberation.
Can a great artist be mean-spirited, grasping, harsh to his family, violent in his emotions, vindictive in his hatreds, an all-purpose scoundrel? If our test cases are the likes of Wagner, Picasso, and, let me say, Dickens, the answer is a resounding yes.
Valentino made my day suit for the wedding of Paloma Picasso in Paris.
Since childhood, it was my dream to go where all the poets and artists had been. Rimbaud, Artaud, Brancusi, Camus, Picasso, Bresson, Goddard, Jeanne Moreau, Juliette Greco, everybody – Paris for me was a Mecca.
I said, I don’t want to paint things like Picasso’s women and Matisse’s odalisques lying on couches with pillows. I don’t want to paint people. I want to paint something I have never seen before. I don’t want to make what I’m looking at. I want the fragments.
I think Picasso was, without doubt, the greatest portraitist of the 20th century, if not any other century.
The bohemian artist who exists only for his art, it’s a myth. OK, it might have been true for Giacometti, but it certainly wasn’t for Picasso or Mozart.
I would like to know what politicians eat on the campaign trail, what Picasso ate in his pink period, what Walt Whitman ate while writing the verse that defined America, what mid-westerners bring to potlucks, what is served at company banquets, what is in a Sunday dinner these days, and what workers bring for lunch.
People can see you on TV sloshing paint around with big four-inch brushes, and I learned to talk to camera in a friendly voice, not talking down to people, just explaining what I was doing. People like Picasso, Van Gogh, and Rembrandt did not have a weekly TV programme where people could see them painting.
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.
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.
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.
I sort of had that fantasy of being one of the muses of Paris and hanging out with Toulouse Lautrec and Picasso.
You don’t buy a Picasso because you love the frame.
I love what Monet, Picasso, Van Gogh and Jesus all said – that love is really the driving principle of the creative act. In fact, they would say that great art is always inspired by love.
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.
Picasso’s sculpture has incredible strength combined with a lack of pomposity.
Picasso once remarked I do not care who it is that has or does influence me as long as it is not myself.
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.
I’m not going to talk about Picasso. I have done my duty to those memories. I have had a great career as an artist myself, you know. I’m not here just because I’ve spent time with Picasso.
Hollywood is like Picasso’s bathroom.
My eyes are at different levels, and my right ear’s a bit bigger than my left – which showed up particularly in school photographs – so my mother used to call me her ‘little Picasso.’
Of course we’d rather not see Picasso teacups and sheets.
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.
The cubism of Braque or Picasso, the dissonant compositions of Schoenberg or Stravinsky, the free-flowing and often erotic choreography of Isadora Duncan and Nijinsky – these were acts of rebellion against the certainties and traditions of the old world.
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.
My heroes were Dylan, John Lennon and Picasso, because they each moved their particular medium forward, and when they got to the point where they were comfortable, they always moved on.
If they were starting their careers today, Rockwell and Picasso would probably both be painting on black velvet.
There is a constant ebb and flow in art historical reputations. The reputation of even the greatest figures like Picasso are in flux.
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.
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.
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.
Picasso said once when being interviewed that one should not be one’s own connoisseur.
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.
When the painting is hanging on your wall for a long time, you don’t notice it. You get tired of it, even if it’s a Picasso. When the next generation inherits the painting, they sell it. I don’t want to be sold.
I was a terrible painter – my portraits looked like the evil chimera love-children of Picasso’s demoiselles and the BBC test card clown.
Picasso, Michelangelo, possibly, might be verging on genius, but I don’t think a painter like Rembrandt is a genius.
I don’t want to compare myself to Picasso, but he had four or five periods in his life. Any good artist grows and changes and matures.
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.
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.’
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.
So many people are exploiting the name Picasso – and, in a way, even the estate is doing it.
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