Pablo Picasso? Gertrude Stein? Alice B. Toklas? Clement Greenberg? Victor Papanek? Edmund Wilson?
Question for Quote Investigator: Creating innovative artworks is difficult, and pioneering artists face strong opposition. New music is deemed discordant and grating. New architecture is labeled misshapen and impractical. New paintings are considered ugly and maladroit. Apparently, a prominent painter once said:
When you make a thing, it is so complicated making it that it is bound to be ugly.
This remark has been attributed to Spanish painter and sculptor Pablo Picasso. Would you please help me to find a citation?
Reply from Quote Investigator: Prominent writer and art collector Gertrude Stein credited Pablo Picasso with this quotation in her 1933 book titled “The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas”. Stein’s book adopted the viewpoint and voice of her friend and life partner Toklas, but Stein was the ultimate author.
The punctuation and phrasing in the book were unconventional because of its stream-of-consciousness style. In the following excerpt, Stein asked Toklas about a recent vernissage which is a private preview of an art exhibition. Toklas criticized two paintings by Picasso. Boldface added by QI:1
What did you think of what you saw, asked Miss Stein. Well I did see something. Sure you did, she said, but did you see what it had to do with those two pictures you sat in front of so long at the vernissage. Only that Picassos were rather awful and the others were not. Sure, she said, as Pablo once remarked, when you make a thing, it is so complicated making it that it is bound to be ugly, but those that do it after you they don’t have to worry about making it and they can make it pretty, and so everybody can like it when the others make it.
Below are additional selected citations in chronological order.
In October 1933, the U.S. literary critic Edmund Wilson examined Stein’s book in the pages of “The New Republic”. Wilson found the quotation fascinating enough to reprint within his review:2
It is an instructive and most entertaining book. The chapters which deal with the period before the War are perhaps the most interesting part: here she tells about her discovery of Picasso and Matisse, what they were like in their early phases, the gradual taking-shape as a movement of the tendencies of isolated artists, the development of her own literary methods. There is a good deal of wisdom about art and artists, literature and writers: “As Picasso once remarked, when you make a thing, it is so complicated making it that it is bound to be ugly, but those that do it after you they don’t have to worry about making it and they can make it pretty, and so everybody can like it when the others make it.”
In 1945 influential art critic Clement Greenberg published an essay in “The Nation” which praised contemporary artist Jackson Pollock as “the strongest painter of his generation”. Greenberg expressed an idea similar to Picasso’s about groundbreaking artworks:3
There has been a certain amount of self-deception in School of Paris art since the exit of cubism. In Pollock there is absolutely none, and he is not afraid to look ugly—all profoundly original art looks ugly at first. Those who find his oils overpowering are advised to approach him through his gouaches, which in trying less to wring every possible ounce of intensity from every square inch of surface achieve greater clarity and are less suffocatingly packed than the oils.
In 1971 U.S. designer and educator Victor Papanek published “Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change”. The epigraph of the seventh chapter displayed a modified version of the quotation attributed to Picasso. The phrase “a thing that is new” was inserted into the quotation. Also, the phrase “after you” was appended to the quotation.4
When you make a thing, a thing that is new, it is so complicated making it that it is bound to be ugly. But those that make it after you, they don’t have to worry about making it. And they can make it pretty, and so everybody can like it when the others make it after you.
Picasso (as quoted by Gertrude Stein)
In 1972 Dore Ashton edited and published “Picasso On Art: A Selection of Views” which accurately reprinted the key passage from Stein’s 1933 book:5
“Sure,” she [Gertrude Stein] said, “as Pablo once remarked, when you make a thing, it is so complicated making it that it is bound to be ugly, but those that do it after you they don’t have to worry about making it and they can make it pretty, and so everybody can like it when others make it.” (Stein, 1933)
In 2022 the nineteenth edition of “Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations” included an entry for the quotation which credited Picasso and reprinted the pertinent passage from the book by Stein.6
In conclusion, Pablo Picasso deserves credit for this quotation based on the testimony of Gertrude Stein contained in her 1933 book titled “The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas”. In 1945 art critic Clement Greenberg also suggested that innovative art is initially labeled ugly.
Image Notes: Public domain image of Pablo Picasso’s ‘Portrait of Gertrude Stein’ circa 1906. Image has been resized, retouched, and cropped.
Acknowledgement: Great thanks to Steven Strogatz whose inquiry led QI to formulate this question and perform this exploration. Strogatz had encountered the altered version of the quotation containing the phrase “a thing that is new”.
- 1933, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein, Chapter 2: My Arrival in Paris, Quote Page 28, Harcourt, Brace and Company, New York. (Verified with scans) ↩︎
- 1933 October 11, The New Republic, Fall Book Section: 27 rue de Fleurs by Edmund Wilson, Start Page 246, Quote Page 246, Column 1, The New Republic, New York. (Verified with scans) ↩︎
- 1945 April 7, The Nation, Art by Clement Greenberg, Start Page 396, Quote Page 397, Column 2, The Nation Associates, New York. (Verified with scans) ↩︎
- 1971 Copyright, Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change by Victor Papanek, Chapter 7: REBEL WITH A CAUSE: Creativity vs. Conformity, (Chapter epigraph), Quote Page 133, Pantheon Books: A Division of Random House, New York. (Verified with scans) ↩︎
- 1972, Picasso On Art: A Selection of Views by Pablo Picasso, Edited by Dore Ashton, Part III, Chapter: Imitation and Imitators, Quote Page 51, The Viking Press, New York. (Note: Page numbers refer to the “Modern Library” edition) (Verified with scans) ↩︎
- 2022, Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, Nineteenth Edition, Original Editor: John Bartlett, General Editor: Geoffrey O’Brien, Section: Gertrude Stein (1874-1946), Quote Page 590, Column 1, Little, Brown and Company, Boston, Massachusetts. (Verified with scans) ↩︎