89 Quotes by Georges Braque

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.

Art is made to trouble but science reassures.

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.

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

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.

The painting is finished when the idea has disappeared.

Art is a wound turned into light.

Truth exists; only lies are invented.

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