Excerpts from "Conversations with Picasso" in Cahiers d'Art, Paris, 1935 published in the book "Art Theory 1900-2000" - A critique of Modernism....
"In the old days, pictures went forward towards completion by stages. Every day brought something new. A picture used to be sum of additions. In my case, a picture is a sum of destructions. I do a picture – then I destroy it. In the end though, nothing is lost; the red I took away from one place turns up somewhere else. It would be very interesting to preserve photographically, not the stages but the metamorphosis of a picture. Possibly, one might then discover the path followed by the brain in materializing a dream. But there is a very odd thing – to notice that basically, a picture doesn’t change, that first ‘vision’ almost remains intact, in spite of appearances. I often ponder on a light and a dark when I put them into a picture, I try hard to break them up by interpolating a color that will create a different effect. When the work is photographed, I find that what I put in to correct my first ‘vision’ has disappeared, and that after all, the photographic image corresponds with my first vision before the transformation I insisted on.
A picture is not thought out and settled beforehand. While it is being done, it changes as one’s thoughts change. And when it is finished, it still goes on changing, according to the mind of whoever is looking at it. A picture lives a life like a living creature, undergoing the changes imposed on us by our life from day to day. This is natural enough, as the picture lives only through the man who is looking at it. […]
When you begin a picture, you often make some pretty discoveries. You must be on guard against these. Destroy the thing; do it over several times. In each destroying of a beautiful discovery, the artist does not really suppress it, but rather transforms it, condenses it, makes it more substantial. What comes out in the end is the result of discarded finds. Otherwise, you become your own connoisseur. I sell myself nothing.
Abstract art is only painting. What about drama?
There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward, you can remove all traces of reality. There is no danger then, because the idea of the object will have left an indelible mark. It is what stirred the artist off, excited his ideas and stirred up his emotions. Ideas and emotions will in the end be prisoners in his work. Whatever they do, they can’t escape from the picture. They form an integral part of it, even when their presence is no longer discernible. Whether he likes it or not, man is the instrument of nature. It forces on him its character and appearance, one cannot go against nature. It is stronger than the strongest man; it is pretty much in our interest to be on good terms with it! We may allow ourselves some liberties, but only in details. Nor is there any ‘figurative’ and ‘nonfigurative’ art. Everything appears to us in the guise of a ‘figure’. Even in metaphysics, ideas are expressed in the guise of symbolic ‘figures’. See how ridiculous it is then to think of painting without ‘figuration’. A person, an object, a circle are all ‘figures’; they react on us more or less intensely. Some are nearer our sensations and produce emotions that touch our affective faculties, others appeal more directly to the intellect. They should all be allowed a place because I find my spirit has quite as much need of emotion as my senses.
Do you think it concerns me that a particular picture of mine represents two people? Though these two people once existed for me, they exist no longer. The ‘vision’ of them gave me a preliminary emotion; then little by little their actual presence became blurred; they developed into a kind of fiction and then disappeared altogether, or rather they were transformed into all kinds of problems. They are no longer two people, you see, but forms and colors, that have taken on, meanwhile, the idea of two people and preserve the vibration of their life. The artist is a receptacle for all emotions that come from all over the place; from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider’s web. That is why we must not discriminate between things. Where things are concerned, there are no class distinctions. We must pick out what is good for us where we can find it – except from our own works. I have a horror of copying myself. […]
[..] The painter goes through states of fullness and evaluation. That is the whole secret of art, I go for a walk in the forest of Fontainbleau, I get ‘green’ indigestion. I must get rid of this sensation into a picture. Green rules it. A painter paints to unload himself of feelings and visions.
People seize on painting to cover up their nakedness. They get what they can wherever they ca. In the end I can’t believe they get anything at all. They’ve simply cut a coat to the measure of their own ignorance. They make everything, from God to a picture, in their own image. That is why the picture-hook is the ruination of a painting –a painting always has certain significance, at least as much as the man who did it. As soon as it is bought and hung on a wall, it takes on quite a different kind of significance, and the painting is done for. 
Academic training in beauty is a sham. We have been deceived, but so well deceived that we can scarcely get back even a shadow of truth. The beauties of the Parthenon, Venuses, Nymphs, Narcissuses are so many lies. Art is not the application of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon. When we love a woman we don’t start measuring her limbs. We love her with our desires – although everything has been done to try and apply a canon even to love. The Parthenon is really only a farmyard over which someone put a roof; colonnades and sculptures were added because there were people in Atens who happened to be working, and wanted to express themselves. It’s not what the artist does that counts, but what he is. Cezzanne would never have interested me a bit if had lived and through like Jacques Emile Blanche, even if the apple he painted had been ten times as beautiful. What forces out interest if Cezzanne’s anxiety – that’s Cezzanne’s lesson; the torments of Van Gogh –that is the actual drama of the man. The rest is a sham. 
Everyone wants to understand art. Why not try to understand the songs of the 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 things often end up barking at the wrong tree. Gertrude Stein joyfully announced to me the other day that she had finally understood what my picture of three musicians meant to be. It was a still life!How can you expect an onlooker to live a picture of mine as I lived it? A picture comes to me from miles away, who is to say from how far away I senses it, saw it, painted it; and yet, the next day I can’t see what I’ve done myself. How can anyone enter my dreams, my instincts, my desires, my thoughts, which have taken a long time to mature and to come out into the day light and above all grasp from them what I have been about – perhaps against my own will?
With the exception of few painters who are opening new horizons to painting, young painters today don’t know which way to go. Instead of taking up our researches in order to react clearly against us, they are absorbed with brining the past back to life – when truly the whole world is open before us everything waiting to be done, not just redone. Why cling desperately to everything that has already been fulfilled in terms of its promise! There are miles of painting ‘in the manner of’; but it is rare to find a young man working in his own way.
Does he wish to believe that a man can’t repeat himself? To repeat is to run counter to spiritual laws, essentially escapism.
I am no pessimist; I don’t loathe art, because I couldn’t live without devoting all my time to it. I love it as the only end of my life. Everything I do connected with it gives me intense pleasure. But still, I don’t see why the whole world should be taken up with art, demand its credentials, and on that subject, give free rein to its own stupidity.
Museums are just a lot of lies, and the people who make art their business are mostly imposters. I don’t understand why revolutionary countries should have more prejudices about art than out-of-date countries! We have infected the pictures in museums with all our stupidities, all our mistakes, all our poverty of spirit. We have turned them into petty and ridiculous things. We have tied them up to a fiction, instead of trying to sense what inner life there was in the men who painted them. There ought to be an absolute dictatorship ….a dictatorship of painter….a dictatorship of one painter…to suppress all those who have betrayed us, to suppress the cheaters, to suppress the tricks, to suppress mannerisms, to suppress charms, to suppress history, to suppress a heap of other things. But common sense always gets away with it. Above all, let’s have a revolution against that! The true dictator will always be conquered by the dictatorship of common sense…and maybe not!
