Cubism Quotes

We walked out of there, and for the first time I felt the mood of a night without feeling that an author was ramming it down my throat for story purposes. I looked at the clean-swept, star-reaching cubism of the Radio City area and its living snakes of neon, and I suddenly thought of an Evelyn Smith story the general idea of which was "After they found out the atom bomb was magic, the rest of the magicians who enchanted refrigerators and washing machines and the telephone system came out into the open." I felt a breath of wind and wondered what it was that had breathed. I heard the snoring of the city and for an awesome second felt it would roll over, open its eyes, and ... speak. ~ Theodore Sturgeon

Cubism is ... a picture for its own sake.
Literary Cubism does the same thing in literature, using reality merely as a means and not as an end. ~ Max Jacob

The activities of these parasites and degenerates gave rise to Cubism, Fauvism, Futurism, Pointillism, Constructivism, Orphism, Surrealism, Dada, and also Impossibleism, Supersurrealism, Dynamic Double-Dog Realism, Ishkabibbleism, and Mama, which is like Dada only nicer. ~ Daniel Pinkwater

The surrealists, and the modern movement in painting as a whole, seemed to offer a key to the strange postwar world with its threat of nuclear war. The dislocations and ambiguities, in cubism and abstract art as well as the surrealists, reminded me of my childhood in Shanghai. ~ J.G. Ballard

As an evil cultist, I make an excellent evil cultist. Only I'm stupid, and not evil. And I worship nothing, really. ~ Will Advise

Cubism is not a reality you can take in your hand. It's more like a perfume, in front of you, behind you, to the sides, the scent is everywhere but you don't quite know where it comes from. ~ Pablo Picasso

It's like Picasso. Cubism.' Fi wrinkled her brow at the subject change but nodded at him to go on. 'That's what it feels like. Someone took reality, pulled it in all directions, cut the stretched out bits into pieces, and then glued everything back together in the wrong places. ~ Moriah McStay

Most people don't do something seminal. I've done it twice: with my tent and my bed. Picasso did it with Cubism. ~ Tracey Emin

Cubism had been an analysis of the object and an attempt to put it before us in its totality; both as analysis and as synthesis, it was a criticism of appearance. Surrealism transmuted the object, and suddenly a canvas became an apparition: a new figuration, a real transfiguration. ~ Octavio Paz

I think music has gone through a period of something very severe, rather radical, rather the way painting did with cubism. ~ Harrison Birtwistle

Cubism is still the most important art movement for the same reason that John D. is still the most important Rockefeller. ~ Brad Holland

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. ~ Georges Braque

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. ~ Georges Braque

No high-minded painter of the last fifty years has been able to come to terms with his art without coming to terms with the problem of cubism. ~ Walter Darby Bannard

There has been 32 isms since the advent of cubism, yet after all there are essentially the same two old strings, the Romantic and the Classical. We've just be confused by the storm. Science and psychology have played a great part to say nothing of sex. ~ Mark Tobey

Seeing Cubism paintings at the Beaubourg makes me very happy and also old films. ~ Yves Saint-Laurent

Cubism was an attack on the perspective that had been known and used for 500 years. It was the first big, big change. It confused people: they said, 'Things don't look like that!' ~ David Hockney

But no matte what kind of an understanding is adopted, whether associated with positivism, which asserts that the truth can only be reached by trial and error, or rationalism, which asserts that everything can be explained and grasped by reason, whether the perspective of romanticism, which overemphasizes imagination and sensitivity, or an approach based on ardent naturalism, whether based on realism, which aims to describe everything as it is including its shortcomings, or a curiosity-raising approach such as surrealism, whether idealism, which asserts that there is nothing real but ideas, or cubism, which asserts that there is nothing real but instead of direct description, or some other such current or perspective, that is not true poetry. ~ M. Fethullah Gulen

The autonomy of art that emerged through Post-Impressionism, Cubism, Mondrian, and the Russian Constructivism had seen painting develop independent of imitations or decoration, and so the content of art became much closer to that of music. ~ Neville Weston

When cubism began to take a social form, Metzinger was especially talked about. He explained cubism, while Picasso never explained anything. It took a few years to see that not talking was better than talking too much. ~ Marcel Duchamp

When we discovered cubism, we did not have the aim of discovering cubism. We only wanted to express what was in us. ~ Pablo Picasso

I hate people who collect things and classify things and give them names and then forget all about them. That's what people are always doing in art. They call a painter an impressionist or a cubist or something and then they put him in a drawer and don't see him as a living individual painter any more. ~ John Fowles

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. ~ Georges Braque

Cubism is not a manner but an aesthetic, and even a state of mind; it is therefore inevitably connected with every manifestation of contemporary thought. It is possible to invent a technique or a manner independently, but one cannot invent the whole complexity of a state of mind. ~ Juan Gris

Every so often, a painter has to destroy painting. Cezanne did it, Picasso did it with Cubism. Then Pollock did it. He busted our idea of a picture all to hell. Then there could be new paintings again. ~ Willem De Kooning

I happen to like Precisionism. It talks to me because I collect Cubism. ~ Leonard Lauder

It is a pity that no one in Paris bothered to quote Coleridge, who wrote, long before cubism, that the true poet is able to reduce 'succession to an instant.' Simultaneity in this sense is the property of all great poetry. ~ LeRoy C. Breunig

Cubism came about because, in the process of analyzing form, something that lay in the form, a plane, could be lifted out to float on its own ... ~ Joseph Plaskett

Cubism is like standing at a certain point on a mountain and looking around. If you go higher, things will look different; if you go lower, again they will look different. It is a point of view. ~ Jacques Lipchitz

Cubism is fascinating to me. I love trying to figure it out. It's just a different way of seeing ... I think there are many avenues that haven't been explored yet. ~ Robert Lyn Nelson