Sign in Sign up
Home Authors Tags Verified
ATTRIBUTED

Give me a museum and I'll fill it.

Attributed
Widely credited, but not traced to a source.

This quote is widely credited to the author across popular collections, but we haven't traced it to a primary published source. The attribution is plausible, but unconfirmed — cite it with care.

Editorial Note
This line is very widely credited to Picasso in both English and French ("Donnez-moi un musée et je le remplirai"), and it captures something genuine about an artist so prolific he produced tens of thousands of works — but we could not trace it to any primary source in Picasso's own writings, speeches, or a documented interview. No book, speech reprint, or newspaper from his lifetime records him saying it. Even reputable references treat it as an undated saying rather than a sourced quotation; Encyclopædia Universalis, for instance, invokes it as a challenge Picasso "launched one day," noting how fittingly it was answered by the 1985 posthumous opening of the Musée Picasso in Paris. Notably, the one book-level citation circulating online (the 2000 volume *I is Style*) does not support this quote at all — that passage is a Kurt Schwitters letter about museums, mistakenly relabeled as Picasso by quotation aggregators. We found no rival author and no reason to doubt the sentiment, but absent a primary source we classify it as attributed rather than verified.
Translations
English 中文 Español العربية Français فارسی 日本語
Related tags
Art Artistry Creativity Cultural heritage Culture Museums
MORE QUOTES BY Pablo Picasso
FEATURED QUOTES
Surprise me with another quote
Instagram Icon Facebook Icon X Icon