Georges Braque Quotes

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.

Art is a wound turned into light.

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

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 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.

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

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

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.

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

The function of Art is to disturb. Science reassures.

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.

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

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 ...

With age, art and life become one.

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.

We will never have repose. The present is perpetual.

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.

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.

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

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

Art is meant to disturb. Science reassures.

The painting is finished when the idea has disappeared.

There are certain mysteries, certain secrets in my own work which even I don't understand, nor do I try to do so.

It is the unforeseeable that creates the event.

I like the rule that corrects emotion.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Out of limitations, new forms emerge

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 ...

You may give all the explanations you like, but your painting makes me feel as if you were trying to make us eat cotton waste and wash it down with kerosene.

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

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

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

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.

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.

We must not imitate that which we seek to create.

Evidence exhausts the truth.

Painting is a nail to which I fasten my ideas.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 ...

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.

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 do not believe in things. I believe in relationships.

Truth exists; only lies are invented.

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.

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