Salvador Dali Quotes

I don't know if you've noticed it. But Duchamp was magnificent.

I don't think there is any question that Picasso is the greatest figure of the 20th century.

It is not possible to overstate the influence of Paul Cezanne on twentieth-century art. He's the modern Giotto, someone who shattered one kind of picture-making and invented a new one that the world followed.

When cubism began to take a social form, Metzinger was especially talked about. He explained cubism, while Picasso never explained anything. It took a few years to see that not talking was better than talking too much.

Picasso was hugely innovative, and, wow, did he have facility, amazing ability, but I don't think he painted a masterpiece.

Varese, Apollinaire, Ezra Pound, Leger, Gleizes, Severini, Villon, Duchamp, Duchamp-Villon, Marie Laurencin, Cocteau and many others were to me household names in the literal sense - names of familiar figures around the house.

In its most limited sense, modern, art would seem to concern itself only with the technical innovations of the period.

My first influence obviously was Picasso.

The basis for my own work during the years just before coming to America in 1915 was a desire to break up forms - to 'decompose' them much along the lines the cubists had done. But I wanted to go further - much further - in fact, in quite another direction altogether.

I'm not interested in pop art.

When you think about Dada and the great moments in Modern Art, it's always the sense of when you're not sure that art is most likely to be occurring.

Dali was the great painter then and surrealism was a way of life.

Well, I'd say that the beginning of this thing came through with Art of This Century, Peggy Guggenheim's, where she opened this gallery and began showing some things that caused a little talk, amongst a lot of other things.

I think Picasso was, without doubt, the greatest portraitist of the 20th century, if not any other century.

I think 'Les Demoiselles D'Avignon' is one of the most transfixing paintings of all time. And it was made by a monster of a man.

I love surrealism.

Picasso.” He whispers like a priest. “Picasso. Who saw the truth. Who painted the truth, molded it, ripped from the earth with two angry hands.

My name is Schwitters, Kurt Schwitters... I'm a painter and I nail my pictures... I'd like to be accepted into the Dada Club

At one point cinema and photography weren't treated as art. Now it's crazy to think they're not. The key question is "What is art today?" The most important artists of the last 20 years are Steve Jobs and Jonathan Ive, because the influence they have had is incredible and they've changed the world. That is art.

In general, modern art... has been inspired by a natural desire to chart the uncharted.

Salvador Dali has been called kitsch, but, although some of this work may be grotesque, its brazenly self-conscious bad taste saves it from being true kitsch, which always strives to please.

If I have called Cubism a new order, it is without any revolutionary ideas or any reactionary ideas... One cannot escape from one's own epoch, however revolutionary one may be.

Who is this Renaissance? Where did he come from? Who gave him permission to cram the Republic with his execrable daubs?

When we discovered cubism, we did not have the aim of discovering cubism. We only wanted to express what was in us.

It was Matisse who took the first step into the undiscovered land of the ugly.