MISATTRIBUTED
The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.
Misattributed
Widely shared under this name, but not theirs.
This quote is commonly circulated under the author's name, but it does not appear in their known works. The true origin is unconfirmed — likely a later paraphrase.
Source
Berthold Auerbach, "Auf der Höhe" (1864), later English translations by Fanny Elizabeth Bunnett (1867) and Simon Adler Stern (1875) as "On the Heights"
Editorial Note
This graceful line is one of the most-repeated "Picasso" quotations, printed everywhere from museum merchandise to art blogs — but Picasso almost certainly never said it. The words belong to the German novelist Berthold Auerbach, who wrote in his 1864 novel "Auf der Höhe" (translated into English as "On the Heights" in 1867 and 1875) that music "washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life." The Picasso version is a later imitation: in January 1964, Playboy ran a feature titled "The Wisdom of Pablo Picasso" in which Auerbach's line was reworked by swapping "music" for "art" and credited, without any source, to the painter — after which the Associated Press, NBC, and Life magazine helped spread it. We found no trace of the sentence in Picasso's own documented writings, interviews, or letters, and the polished "purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls" phrasing is simply a looser paraphrase of that 1964 substitution. On the strength of a named, datable original that predates the attribution by a century, the credit belongs to Auerbach, not Picasso.
