If I Spit, They Will Take My

If Everybody Is Looking For It, Then Nobody Is Finding It. If We Were Cultured, We Would Not Be Conscious Of Lacking Culture. We Would Regard It As Something Natural And Would Not Make So Much Fuss About It. And If We Knew The Real Value Of This Word We Would Be Cultured Enough Not To Give It So Much Importance.

But When I Am Alone, I Do Not Have The Effrontery To Consider Myself An Artist At All, Not In The Grand Old Meaning Of The Word: Giotto, Titian, Rembrandt, Goya Were Great Painters. I Am Only A Public Clown-a Mountebank. I Have Understood My Time And Have Exploited The Imbecility, The Vanity, The Greed Of My Contemporaries. It Is A Bitter Confession, This Confession Of Mine, More Painful Than It May Seem. But At Least And At Last It Does Have The Merit Of Being Honest.

Only When Painting Isn't Painting Can There Be An Affront To Modesty.

We Didn't Want To Sign The Painting Itself, That Would Have Interfered With The Composition. And Even Later, For That Reason Or For Another, I Sometimes Marked My Canvases On The Back. If You Don't See My Signature And The Date, Madam, It's Because The Frame Is Hiding It.

What Does It Mean For A Painter To Paint In The Manner Of So-and-so Or To Actually Imitate Someone Else? What's Wrong With That? On The Contrary, It's A Good Idea. You Should Constantly Try To Paint Like Someone Else. But The Thing Is, You Can't! You Would Like To. You Try. But It Turns Out To Be A Botch... And It's At The Very Moment You Make A Botch Of It That You're Yourself.