Francis Picabia Quotes

13 Sourced Quotes

My arse contemplates those who talk behind my back.

Francis Picabia
Nature is unfair? So much the better, inequality is the only bearable thing, the monotony of equality can only lead us to boredom.

Francis Picabia
Let us never forget that the greatest man is never more than an animal disguised as a god.

Francis Picabia
Perhaps we'll be able to do beautiful things, since I have a stellar, insane desire to assassinate beauty.

Francis Picabia
The devil follows me day and night because he is afraid to be alone.

Francis Picabia
The aim of art is to get us to dream, just like music, for it expresses a mood projected onto the canvas, which arouses identical sensations in the viewer.

Francis Picabia
The Cubists want to cover Dada with snow; that may surprise you, but it is so, they want to empty the snow from their pipe to bury DaDa.
Are you sure?
Positively sure, the facts are revealed by grotesque mouths. They think that Dada can prevent them from practicing this odious trade: Selling art expensively.
Art costs more than sausages, more than women, more than everything.
Art is visible like God (see Saint-Sulpice).
Art is a pharmaceutical product for imbeciles.
The table turns thanks to spirit; the paintings and other works of arts are like strong-box tables, the spirit is inside and becomes more and more
inspired according to the auction prices.
Farce, farce, farce, farce, farce, my dear friends.

Francis Picabia
Men have always need of god! A god to defend them against other men.

Francis Picabia
'Udnie – I see Again in Memory my Dear Udnie' is no more the portrait of a young girl than 'Edtaonisl' [counterpart of his work 'Udnie'] is the image of a prelate, as we ordinarily conceive of them. They are [both] memories of America, evocations of over there which, subtly set down like musical chords, become representative of an idea, a nostalgia, a fleeting impression.

Francis Picabia
Between my head and my hand, there is always the face of death.

Francis Picabia
Splendid, it has done me enormous good to finally see and read something in Switzerland that isn't bullshit. All of it is very nice, it is really something; your manifesto expresses every philosophy seeking truth, when there is no truth, only convention.

Francis Picabia
.. giving plastic reality to inner states of the mind.

Francis Picabia
I do not consider myself a Cubist either because I have come to the conclusion that cubes are not always made for expressing the thought of the brain and of the feeling of the spirit... I capture all these impressions [the visual sensations, Picabia sensed in the modern city] without any hurry to transfer to the canvas. I let them rest in my brain and then, when I'm visited by the spirit of creation, I improvise my paintings just as a musician improvises his music.

Francis Picabia