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Creativity Quote by Georges Braque

"Once an object has been incorporated in a picture, it accepts a new destiny"

About this Quote

Braque is smuggling a radical claim in a calm, almost bureaucratic sentence: art doesn’t merely depict the world, it recruits it. The moment an object is pulled into a picture, it stops being just a bottle, a violin, a newspaper. It becomes evidence in a new argument about seeing. “Accepts” is the sly word here, suggesting consent where there’s actually a kind of gentle violence: the image imposes a fate. Representation isn’t neutral; it’s an act of reclassification.

In Braque’s Cubist context, that matters. Cubism didn’t want the old contract of painting - the comforting illusion that a canvas is a window. It wanted to show how objects are assembled by perception, how angles, fragments, and viewpoints manufacture “the thing.” When Braque (and Picasso) began folding in collage elements like faux wood grain or printed text, the object’s “destiny” became literal: a scrap of newspaper could be both itself and the idea of news, modern life, noise, commerce. The object is promoted from mute matter to cultural sign.

The subtext is also a warning about authorship and power. The artist is a sort of legislator of meaning, deciding what an object will be allowed to do inside the frame. Once there, it can’t go back to being innocent. That’s why the line still reads contemporary: in an era of endless images, everything we photograph or meme is drafted into a storyline, branded with a tone, assigned a role. To be pictured is to be repurposed.

Quote Details

TopicArt
Source
Later attribution: How to Get Sh*t Done (Erin Falconer, 2018) modern compilationISBN: 9781501165795 · ID: 3fUxDwAAQBAJ
Text match: 95.00%   Provider: Google Books
Evidence:
... Once an object has been incorporated in a picture it accepts a new destiny . -GEORGES BRAQUE Understanding this concept is crucial to answering one of the very first fundamental questions of P - personality or who are you in your own ...
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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Braque, Georges. (2026, March 25). Once an object has been incorporated in a picture, it accepts a new destiny. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/once-an-object-has-been-incorporated-in-a-picture-101383/

Chicago Style
Braque, Georges. "Once an object has been incorporated in a picture, it accepts a new destiny." FixQuotes. March 25, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/once-an-object-has-been-incorporated-in-a-picture-101383/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"Once an object has been incorporated in a picture, it accepts a new destiny." FixQuotes, 25 Mar. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/once-an-object-has-been-incorporated-in-a-picture-101383/. Accessed 31 Mar. 2026.

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Once an object has been incorporated in a picture it accepts a new destiny
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About the Author

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Georges Braque (May 13, 1882 - August 31, 1963) was a Artist from France.

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