What do you think an artist is? ...he is a political being, constantly aware of the heart breaking, passionate, or delightful things that happen in the world, shaping himself completely in their image. Painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war.

Picasso rejects the idea of art as mere decoration and insists that the artist is inevitably entangled with public life. The “political being” is not necessarily a partisan propagandist, but someone whose sensibility is shaped by the world’s suffering and joy and who, in turn, gives those realities form. In this view, painting becomes a means of witness and intervention: it can expose violence, contest official narratives, and mobilize feeling. The closing claim—art as an “instrument of war”—frames images as active forces in ideological struggle, aligning Picasso’s modernist practice with the moral urgency often associated with works like Guernica.