Picasso did say that art is a lie that makes us realize the truth. He said it in 1923, and it is the best documented line he left. Several of the quotes printed under his name are not his: one was written by another painter, and others have no author anyone can name.
A quotation is only as good as its address: a date, a publication, a person who was in the room. Picasso is one of the most quoted artists who ever lived, and a surprising number of his famous lines have no address at all.
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Even the best sourced of his lines comes with a catch. Picasso said it in Spanish, in 1923, and a New York magazine printed it only in English. The sentence that circulates today is also shorter than the one he gave.
That makes it the lucky one. Of the lines most often attached to his name, several cannot be found in anything he said or wrote, and at least one was written by someone else, in 1885. In at least two cases, the earliest attribution to Picasso that I could find dates from after his death in 1973.
To sort the real lines from the borrowed ones, each has to be traced back to its first printing. The dates are not kind to the quotations people love best.
How does Picasso's sentence about lies really end?
It ends with a qualification that almost nobody keeps…
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