The academic teaching on beauty is false. We have been misled, but so completely misled that we can no longer find so much as a shadow of a truth again. The beauties of the Parthenon, the Venuses, the Nymphs, the Narcisusses, are so many lies. Art is not the application of a canon of beauty, but what the instinct and the brain can conceive independently of that canon… To tell the truth the Parthenon is only a truss on which a roof has been placed.

Pablo Picasso, 1934

Cited in: Friedenthal, Richard (trans. Daphne Woodward) (1963) Letters of the Great Artists – from Blake to Pollock. London: Thames and Hudson, pp.258-259.

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