Creativity Quote by Dick Bruna

Ambition, in Dick Bruna's mouth, is almost comically outsized: Picasso, Rembrandt, van Gogh - the holy trinity of art-world mythmaking. The line works because it’s both earnest and quietly self-correcting. Bruna isn’t bragging; he’s staging a familiar fantasy, the youthful itch to matter on a grand scale, then letting the weight of those names expose the fantasy’s absurdity. To say you want to "become" them isn’t just to want skill or fame. It’s to want entry into a canon that turns people into symbols: Picasso as omnivorous reinvention, Rembrandt as gravitas and mastery, van Gogh as sanctified suffering.

The subtext is a sly admission about how artists are trained to desire greatness before they know what their own voice sounds like. Bruna’s career makes the statement even sharper. He didn’t become a tortured genius or a market-dominating titan; he became something stranger and, arguably, rarer: a maker of a clean, instantly recognizable visual language that reached millions through children’s books, design, and public culture. In a world that prizes complexity as proof of seriousness, Bruna built a legacy on reduction.

Context matters: postwar Europe was rebuilding not just cities but taste, identity, and everyday life. Bruna’s pared-down forms and bright clarity read as a democratic answer to the museum pedestal. The quote holds the tension between wanting the pedestal and choosing the sidewalk: the moment an artist realizes that "great" might mean beloved, useful, and repeatable - not just legendary.