I happen to have been born a Cartesian. The French education is based on a sequence of strict logic. You carry it with you.
I would have to think about it for two or three months before I decided to do something which would have meaning. And it would have to be more than just an impression or pleasure. I would need an objective, a meaning. That is the only thing that could help me.
Painter after painter, since the beginning of the century, has tended toward abstraction. First, the Impressionists simplified the landscape in terms of color, and then the Fauves simplified it again by adding distortion, which, for some reason, is a characteristic of our century.
What art is, in reality, is this missing link, not the links which exist. It's not what you see that is art; art is the gap.
It is a matter of great indifference to me what criticism is printed in the papers and the magazines. I am simply working out my own ideas in my own way.
I was never interested in looking at myself in an aesthetic mirror. My intention was always to get away from myself, though I knew perfectly well that I was using myself. Call it a little game between 'I' and 'me.'
I didn't abandon everything at a moment's notice - on the contrary. I returned to France from America, leaving the 'Large Glass' unfinished.
I like living, breathing better than working... Each second, each breath is a work which is inscribed nowhere, which is neither visual nor cerebral. It's a kind of constant euphoria.
I came to feel an artist might use anything - a dot, a line, the most conventional or unconventional symbol - t say what he wanted to say.
One does not contemplate it like a picture. The idea of contemplation disappears completely. Simply take note that it's a bottle rack, or that it's a bottle rack that has changed its destination... It's not the visual question of the readymade that counts; it's the fact that it exists, even.
The basis for my own work during the years just before coming to America in 1915 was a desire to break up forms - to 'decompose' them much along the lines the cubists had done. But I wanted to go further - much further - in fact, in quite another direction altogether.
My position is the lack of a position, but, of course, you can't even talk about it; the minute you talk, you spoil the whole game.
I am still a victim of chess. It has all the beauty of art - and much more. It cannot be commercialized. Chess is much purer than art in its social position.
When the vision of the 'Nude' flashed upon me, I knew that it would break forever the enslaving chains of Naturalism.
If your choice enters into it, then taste is involved - bad taste, good taste, uninteresting taste. Taste is the enemy of art, A-R-T.