David Bailey Quotes

Pablo Picasso first entered my consciousness when I was a boy of about eight years old.

The paintings by Van Gough and Chagall had a big influence on me.

I wanted to paint in a folk-artist-y way. My heroes were Van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse, and Rembrandt. I think Picasso is about as a modern as I got. But I incorporated things that they rejected as well as movements that happened later.

Picasso is a character that has pursued me for a long time and I always rejected. He deserves a lot of respect because I am from Malaga, and I was born four blocks from where he was born.

He drove his kind of realism at me so hard I bounced right into nonobjective painting.

Warhol was definitely an inspiration when I was younger. I wouldn't quantify his sort of influence. I've been influenced by nature and science, and I've been influenced by people like Ernst and Rauschenberg, Cornell and Bosch and Bruegel, by writers like Haruki Murakami to Pablo Neruda to Artaud.

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.

If I could have any artist's work on my sitting room wall it would probably be by Van Gogh or Picasso.

Painter after painter, since the beginning of the century, has tended toward abstraction. First, the Impressionists simplified the landscape in terms of color, and then the Fauves simplified it again by adding distortion, which, for some reason, is a characteristic of our century.

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

'Le Reve' may be one of the three best pictures Pablo Picasso ever painted.

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

I went to the Academy and studied with Stuck who was then a big man. But didn't interest me. I didn't know that before me there was Kandinsky and Klee who had also studied with Stuck. He had a good name at that time.

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

I happen to like Precisionism. It talks to me because I collect Cubism.

Born in Kansas City, Missouri, and knowing nothing about Picasso, I had the audacity to knock on his door, became his friend, and took thousands of photographs, of him, his studios, his life and his friends.

Cubism is still the most important art movement for the same reason that John D. is still the most important Rockefeller.

Well, let's say we acknowledged the School of French Painting - the Paris School of painting as the leading force and vitality of the time. I think that was understood and felt and experienced.

Whether it be in comics, games or film, you can trace the art direction and influences back to some earlier, real-life historic period or artistic movement.

I'm not interested in pop art.

Yes, I did, I mean I painted er, in a kind of abstract expressionist way, because of course that was exciting.

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

If we had never met Picasso, would Cubism have been what it is? I think not. The meeting with Picasso was a circumstance in our lives.

You couldn't forget Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Joan Miro either. And it had to be, you know, at least as good or better.