I couldn't portray a women in all her natural loveliness.... I haven't the skill. No one has. I must, therefore, create a new sort of beauty, the beauty that appears to me in terms of volume of line, of mass, of weight, and through that beauty interpret my subjective impression. Nature is mere a pretext for decorative composition, plus sentiment. It suggests emotion, and I translate that emotion into art. I want to express the absolute, not merely the factitious woman.

from the article The wild men of Paris, Gelett Burgess, in 'The Architectural Record', May 1910; as quoted in Braque Edwin Mullins, Thames and Hudson, London 1968, p. 34