Pablo Picasso

ESFP

QUOTE

 * Picasso: "That is my guitar. It may not be yours. It may not be Jacqueline's. But it's mine. You see, we go to the Beaux-Arts. They try to teach us everything. They wind up by teaching us nothing. They have us make copies of everybody, trying to turn us into another Velasquez or another Goya or maybe Poussin, and we remain nobody. Art begins with the individual. When the individuality appears, that's the beginning of art. So much for my Guitar."


 * The New Yorker: "Physically, Picasso has always been abnormally alert. His eyes are inordinately quick at seizing and noting details, and he likes to pamper his extraordinarily acute sense of smell. In his early, impoverished Montmartre days, whenever (as rarely happened) he had a hundred francs to invest in pleasure, he would buy a big bottle of eau de cologne for Fernande Olivier, the first and most historic of his many public Paris attachments."


 * The New Yorker: "His gestation of an idea for a picture is so rapid that its very brevity keeps it from exhausting him. When he starts to work, nothing distracts him and everything disturbs him. Without looking or listening, he sees and hears all that is going on around him."


 * Picasso: "I don't paint pictures in the hope that people will understand them. They understand or not, according to their capacity. It's wrong to be so concerned about people's understanding, anyway."


 * The New Yorker: "Disguise, too, has always fascinated him. In one of his earliest self-portraits, painted at the age of fifteen, he portrayed himself in a white wig and the costume of the eighteenth century; a few years later he elaborately sketched himself as a Barcelona swell, in a top hat, a white silk scarf, and a chesterfield—none of which he possessed, of course. One of his first sketches of himself in Paris showed him in front of the Moulin Rouge dressed in bicycle breeches, though he had no bicycle, either; another showed him in a toga, lying on a beach, palette in hand."


 * Picasso: "Matisse does a drawing, then he recopies it. He recopies it five times, ten times, each time with cleaner lines. He is persuaded that the last one, the most spare, is the best, the purest, the definitive one; and yet, usually it’s the first. When it comes to drawing, nothing is better than the first sketch."


 * The New Yorker: "In one way, at least, Picasso fulfills the popular notion of the conventional artist, who is always supposed to work in a studio cluttered by disorder. (The notion is mostly untrue today among eminent painters; Matisse’s studio, for instance, was as tidy as a rich doctor’s waiting room, and the dandified Braque keeps his workrooms as well tended and polished as the shoes on his feet.)"


 * Picasso: "To know what you’re going to draw, you have to begin drawing."


 * The New Yorker: "Picasso’s power of magnetism, his energy, and his concentration have, on the whole, not lessened with age. His use of his eyes, with their quality of searching attention, is still striking; when he comes into an unfamiliar room, his rapid black-eyed glance seems to register everything in a sudden exclusive exposure, like a photographer’s lens taking a group picture."


 * Salvador Dali: "Picasso who is a very generous being, was the only one who lent me money, so I could travel to America."


 * The New Yorker: "With Picasso, Sabartés noted, “thought and action are paired.” Then, launching into an assessment as consecutive as a household inventory, he went on to say that Picasso is a stranger to premeditation, his whole entity being restless."