Meaning

Picasso is making a bold claim about the nature of imagination: that it is not a departure from reality but a form of reality in its own right. An image, an idea, or an emotion that exists in the mind has genuine existence. For an artist, this is a liberating principle because it removes the question of whether something is "real enough" to be worth making. If you can conceive of it, it already belongs to the world in some meaningful sense.

Context

This statement reflects a perspective that runs through much of modern art, particularly the movements Picasso was associated with, such as Cubism, which challenged the idea that art should simply reproduce visible surfaces. The claim is also philosophically interesting beyond art: it echoes ideas found in Platonism and in various schools of thought that treat mental and imaginative experience as genuine categories of existence, not mere shadows of physical things.

About the author

Pablo Picasso was a Spanish painter and sculptor born in 1881 who became one of the most celebrated and influential artists of the twentieth century. He co-developed Cubism alongside Georges Braque and produced an enormous and varied body of work across painting, sculpture, printmaking, and ceramics. His willingness to break with conventional representation and to experiment relentlessly made him a defining figure in the development of modern art. He died in France in 1973.