I Begin With An Idea And Then

The Quality Of A Painter Depends On The Amount Of Past He Carries With Him.

I Am A Communist And My Painting Is A Communist Painting. But If I Were A Shoemaker, Royalist Or Communist Or Anything Else, I Would Not Necessarily Hammer My Shoes In Any Special Way To Show My Politics.

Matisse Makes A Drawing, Then He Makes A Copy Of It. He Copies It Five Times, Ten Times, Always Clarifying The Line. He’s Convinced That The Last, The Most Stripped Down, Is The Best, The Purest, The Definitive One; And In Fact, Most Of The Time, It Was The First. In Drawing, Nothing Is Better Than The First Attempt.

Everyone Wants To Understand Art. Why Not Try To Understand The Song Of A Bird? Why Does One Love The Night, Flowers, Everything Around One, Without Trying To Understand Them? But In The Case Of A Painting People Have To Understand. If Only They Would Realize Above All That An Artist Works Of Necessity, That He Himself Is Only A Trifling Bit Of The World, And That No More Importance Should Be Attached To Him Than To Plenty Of Other Things Which Please Us In The World, Though We Can't Explain Them. People Who Try To Explain Pictures Are Usually Barking Up The Wrong Tree.

I'm A Joker Who Has Understood His Epoch And Has Extracted All He Possibly Could From The Stupidity, Greed And Vanity Of His Contemporaries.