Everyone wants to understand painting.
Why don’t they try to
understand the song of the birds?
Why do they love a night, a flower,
everything which surrounds man,
without attempting to understand them?
Whereas where painting is concerned,
they want to understand.
Let them understand above all
that the artist works from necessity;
that he, too,
is a minute element of the world
to whom one should ascribe no more importance
than so many things in nature
which charm us but which we do not explain to ourselves.
Those who attempt to explain a picture are on the wrong track
most of the time.
Pablo Picasso
Boisgeloup, winter 1934
