from an article by John Garth,
Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, in the ARGONAT.
(no date given)
In his book LIBRO NERO¹, ², the Italian author Giovanni Papini gives this report of an interview he had with the top god of modern art, Pablo Picasso. Here is what Picasso reportedly thinks of himself:
F rom the moment that art ceases to be food that feeds the best minds, the artist can use his talents to perform all the tricks of the intellectual charlatan. Most people can today no longer expect to receive consolation and exaltation from art.
T he "refined," the rich, the professional "do-nothings", the distillers of quintessence desire only the peculiar, the sensational, the eccentric, the scandalous in today's art. I myself, since the advent of Cubism, have fed these fellows what they wanted and satisfied these critics with all the ridiculous ideas that have passed through my mind.
T he less they understood them, the more they admired me. Through amusing myself with all these absurd farces, I became celebrated, and very rapidly. For a painter, celebrity means sales and consequent affluence. Today, as you know, I am celebrated, I am rich.
B ut 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."