Cubism Quotes

“The Cubists used the figure, but they broke it up..”

“Cubism is an anatomical chart of a way of seeing external objects. But I want to confuse the meaning of the act of looking.”

“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.”

“Cubism did not accept the logical consequences of its own discoveries; it was not developing abstraction towards its own goal, the expression of pure reality.”

“The square is not a subconscious form. It is the creation of intuitive reason. The face of the new art. The square is a living, regal infant. The first step of pure creation in art.”

“People talk of Picasso as the leader of the Cubists but, strictly speaking, he is no longer a Cubist. Today he is a Cubist, tomorrow he will be something else. The only true Cubists are Gleizes and Metzinger.”

“Or the Cubists. When you think about it now, it is so silly to look at an object from many angles.. .It's very silly. It's good that they got those ideas because it is enough for some of them to become good artists.”

“We [the Futurists] must smash, demolish and destroy our traditional harmony, which makes us fall into a 'gracefullness' created by timid and sentimental cubs [this denigrating word refers to the French Cubists].”

“Movements in modern art, such as the Cubist movement, the Surrealist movement, or the Constructivist movement, are usually regarded as attempts by a group of artists to organize themselves to further their common interests.”

“All these isms are of foreign origin, and truly should have no place in American art. While not all media of social or political protest, all are instruments and weapons of destruction...Cubism aims to destroy by designed disorder.”

“Unless we are to condemn all modern painting, we must regard cubism as legitimate, for it continues modern methods, and we should see in it the only conception of pictorial art now possible. In other words, at this moment cubism is painting.”

“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.”

“One must have lived those years between 1907 and 1914 with them [ Braque, Picasso and the younger Juan Gris ] in order to understand the meaning of a collective effort by a number of great painters, in order to understand anything of the continual exchange of [artist] ideas.”

“On August 2, 1914, I took Braque and Derain to the Gare d'Avignon [Paris' train-station, they were drafted for World war 1.] I never saw them again [not literally a fact, but the close relation with Braque ended].”

“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.”

“Cubism is not a formula, it is not a school. Cubism is a philosophy, a point of view in the universe. It 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.”

“I felt it necessary to evolve entirely new concepts (of form and space and paintings) and postulate them in an instrument that could continue to shake itself free from dialectical perversions. The dominant ones, Cubism and Expressionism, only reflected the attitudes of power or spiritual debasement of the individual.”

“I love to experiment with all styles, and do not have any particular prejudice or bias towards any specific style. These works appear, and they turn out, the way they should. I do not decide in what style I want to paint. I am only experimenting. Even Picasso, when he arrived at Cubism, had already experimented with a lot of other styles.”

“..it was the Cubist painters who created the new magic of space and color that everywhere today confronts our eyes in new architecture and design. Since then the various branches of modern art through exhaustive experiment and research have created a vast laboratory whose discoveries unveiled for all the secrets of form, line and color...”

“This is the way in which the artist [in Russian Constructivism (art|Constructivism]] ] has set about the construction of the world - an activity which affects every human being and carries work beyond the frontiers of comprehension. We see how its creative path took it by way of Cubism to pure construction, but there was still no outlet to be found here.”