If I paint a wild horse, you might not see the horse... but surely you will see the wildness!

The remark (often attributed to Picasso) contrasts literal depiction with expressive truth. It suggests that an artwork’s success need not hinge on photographic recognizability (“you might not see the horse”) but on conveying an essential quality or energy (“the wildness”). Read this way, the line defends modernist distortion and abstraction as tools for intensifying meaning: form can be bent, simplified, or fragmented if doing so communicates the subject’s character more powerfully than careful representation would. It also implies a hierarchy of artistic aims—capturing spirit, emotion, or movement over surface appearance—aligning with a broader 20th‑century shift toward expression as a primary criterion of artistic value.