Top 100 Henri Matisse Quotes
#1. Seek the strongest color effect possible ... the content is of no importance.
Henri Matisse
#2. Ever since there have been men, man has given himself over to too little joy. That alone, my brothers, is our original sin. I should believe only in a God who understood how to dance.
Henri Matisse
#3. Modern art spreads joy around by its color, which calms us.
Henri Matisse
#4. A picture must possess a real power to generate light and for a long time now I've been conscious of expressing myself through light or rather in light.
Henri Matisse
#5. I cannot copy nature in a servile way; I am forced to interpret nature and submit it to the spirit of the picture. From the relationship I have found in all the tones there must result a living harmony of colors, a harmony analogous to that of a musical composition.
Henri Matisse
#6. From the moment I held the box of colors in my hands, I knew this was my life. I threw myself into it like a beast that plunges towards the thing it loves.
Henri Matisse
#7. I've been forty years discovering that the queen of all colors is black.
Henri Matisse
#8. Put a colour upon a canvas - it not only colours with that colour the part of the canvas to which the colour has been applied, but it also colours the surrounding space with the complementary.
Henri Matisse
#9. I do not literally paint that table, but the emotion it produces upon me.
Henri Matisse
#10. Color, even more than drawing, is a means of liberation.
Henri Matisse
#11. Art should be something like a good armchair in which to rest from physical fatigue.
Henri Matisse
#12. A distinction is made between artists who work directly from nature and those who work purely from imagination. Neither if these methods should be preferred to the exclusion of the other. Often both are used in turn by the same man ...
Henri Matisse
#16. My models, my human figures, are never like extras in an interior. They are the main theme of my work. I depend absolutely on my model ...
Henri Matisse
#17. Truth and reality in art begin at the point where the artist ceases to understand what he is doing and capable of doing - yet feels in himself a force that becomes steadily stronger ... and more concentrated.
Henri Matisse
#18. The use of expressive colors is felt to be one of the basic elements of the modern mentality, an historical necessity, beyond choice.
Henri Matisse
#19. Seek for the boldest color possible, content is irrelevant.
Henri Matisse
#20. There are always flowers for those who want to see them.
Henri Matisse
#21. Color helps to express light, not the physical phenomenon, but the only light that really exists, that in the artist's brain.
Henri Matisse
#22. I do not distinguish between the construction of a book and that of a
painting and I always proceed from the simple to the complex. - 1946
Henri Matisse
#23. I have always tried to hide my efforts and wished my works to have a light joyousness of springtime which never lets anyone suspect the labors it has cost me.
Henri Matisse
#24. The whole arrangement of my picture is expressive. The place occupied by the figures or objects, the empty spaces around them, the proportions, everything plays a part.
Henri Matisse
#25. Hatred is a parasite that devours all. One doesn't build upon hatred, but upon love.
Henri Matisse
#26. A work of art must carry in itself its complete significance and impose it upon the beholder even before he can identify the subject-matter ...
Henri Matisse
#27. It is not enough to place colors, however beautiful, one beside the other; colors must also react on one another. Otherwise, you have cacophony.
Henri Matisse
#28. Drawing is like making an expressive gesture with the advantage of permanence.
Henri Matisse
#29. For my part I have never avoided the influence of others. I would have considered it cowardice and a lack of sincerity toward myself.
Henri Matisse
#30. I have simply wished to assert the reasoned and independent feeling of my own individuality within a total knowledge of tradition.
Henri Matisse
#31. All my efforts go into creating an art that can be understood by everyone.
Henri Matisse
#32. If my story were ever to be written truthfully from start to finish, it would amaze everyone.
Henri Matisse
#33. Don't try to be original. Be simple. Be good technically, and if there is something in you, it will come out.
Henri Matisse
#34. The energy within you is stronger than ever for being held back, compressed, and said No to ...
Henri Matisse
#35. Seeing is in itself a creative act which requires effort.
Henri Matisse
#37. There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted.
Henri Matisse
#38. I would like to recapture that freshness of vision which is characteristic of extreme youth when all the world is new to it.
Henri Matisse
#39. There are flowers everywhere, for those who bother to look.
Henri Matisse
#40. Much of the beauty that arises in art comes from the struggle an artist wages with his limited medium.
Henri Matisse
#41. I don't paint things. I only paint the difference between things.
Henri Matisse
#42. I don't know whether I believe in God or not. I think, really, I'm some kind of a Buddhist. But the essential thing is to put oneself in a frame of mind which is close to that of prayer.
Henri Matisse
#43. There is no interruption between my older paintings and my cutouts. Just that with an increasing sense of the absolute, and more abstraction, I have achieved a form that is simplified to its essence.
Henri Matisse
#44. It is with color that you render light, though you must also feel this light, have it within yourself.
Henri Matisse
#45. After a half-century of hard work and reflection the wall is still there.
Henri Matisse
#46. A new painting is a unique event, a birth, which enriches the universe as it is grasped by the human mind, by bringing a new form into it.
Henri Matisse
#47. The Barnes Foundation is the only sane place to see art in America.
Henri Matisse
#48. I was very embarrassed when my canvases began to fetch high prices. I saw myself condemned to a future of nothing but Masterpieces.
Henri Matisse
#49. Did not the artists of the great age of Japanese art change names many times during their careers? I like that; they wanted to safeguard their freedom.
Henri Matisse
#50. A young painter who cannot liberate himself from the influence of past generations is digging his own grave.
Henri Matisse
#51. We ought to view ourselves with the same curiosity and openness with which we study a tree, the sky or a thought, because we too are linked to the entire universe.
Henri Matisse
#52. One gets into a state of creativity by conscious work.
Henri Matisse
#53. A rapid rendering of a landscape represents only one moment of its existence. I prefer, by insisting upon its essential character, to risk losing charm in order to gain greater stability.
Henri Matisse
#54. What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter - a soothing, calming influence on the mind, rather like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue.
Henri Matisse
#55. Instinct must be thwarted just as one prunes the branches of a tree so that it will grow better.
Henri Matisse
#56. It has always bothered me that I don't paint like everyone else
Henri Matisse
#57. One must, of course, have one's entire experience behind one and not have lost the freshness of instinct.
Henri Matisse
#58. What interests me most is neither still life nor landscape: it is the human figure.
Henri Matisse
#59. When I started to paint I felt transported into a kind of paradise ... In everyday life I was usually bored and vexed ... Starting to paint I felt gloriously free ...
Henri Matisse
#60. When a painting is finished, it's like a new born child, and the artist himself must have time for understanding. How then do you expect an amateur to understand that which the artist dos not yet comprehend.
Henri Matisse
#61. Drawing is of the spirit; color is of the senses.
Henri Matisse
#62. Above all, an artist must never be too easily satisfied with what he has done ...
Henri Matisse
#63. Composition is the art of arranging in a decorative manner the various elements which the painter uses to express his sentiments. In a picture every separate part will be visible and ... everything which has no utility in the picture is for that reason harmful.
Henri Matisse
#64. I am driven on by an idea that I really only grasp as it grows with the picture.
Henri Matisse
#65. A thimbleful of red is redder than a bucketful.
Henri Matisse
#66. Time extracts various values from a painter's work. When these values are exhausted the pictures are forgotten, and the more a picture has to give, the greater it is.
Henri Matisse
#69. When I eat a tomato I look at it the way anyone else would. But when I paint a tomato, then I see it differently.
Henri Matisse
#70. What's so astonishing about not understanding? There are so many things in art, beginning with art itself, that one doesn't understand. A painter doesn't see everything that he has put in his painting.
Henri Matisse
#71. When an artist or student draws a nude figure with painstaking care, the result is drawing, and not emotion.
Henri Matisse
#73. Color was not given to us in order that we imitate Nature. It was given to us so that we can express our emotions.
Henri Matisse
#74. The effort to see things without distortion takes something like courage and this courage is essential to the artist, who has to look at everything as though he saw it for the first time.
Henri Matisse
#75. Whoever wishes to devote himself to painting should begin by cutting out his own tongue
Henri Matisse
#76. I counted solely on the clarity of expression of my work to gain my ends.
Henri Matisse
#77. Fit the parts together, one into the other, and build your figure like a carpenter builds a house. Everything must be constructed, composed of parts that make a whole ...
Henri Matisse
#78. It has bothered me all my life that I do not paint like everybody else.
Henri Matisse
#79. You must forget all your theories, all your ideas before the subject. What part of these is really your own will be expressed in your expression of the emotion awakened in you by the subject.
Henri Matisse
#80. Purer colors ... have in themselves, independently of the objects they serve to express, a significant action on the feelings of those who look at them.
Henri Matisse
#81. Simple colours can affect the intimate feelings with all the more force because they are simple.
Henri Matisse
#83. To draw is to make an idea precise. Drawing is the precision of thought.
Henri Matisse
#84. In the beginning you must subject yourself to the influence of nature. You must be able to walk firmly on the ground before you start walking on a tightrope.
Henri Matisse
#85. A certain blue enters your soul. A certain red has an effect on your blood-pressure.
Henri Matisse
#86. With color one obtains an energy that seems to stem from witchcraft.
Henri Matisse
#87. I have been no more than a medium, as it were.
Henri Matisse
#88. The sign for which I forge an image has no value if it doesn't harmonize with other signs, which I must determine in the course of my invention and which are completely peculiar to it.
Henri Matisse
#89. The essential thing is to work in a state of mind that approaches prayer.
Henri Matisse
#90. There's nothing clinically wrong with me, only an emotional imbalance - I pass too quickly from the wildest enthusiasm to the blackest despair.
Henri Matisse
#93. When I paint green, it doesn't mean grass; when I paint blue, it doesn't mean sky.
Henri Matisse
#94. There are wonderful things in Jazz, the improvisation, the liveliness, the being at one with the audience.
Henri Matisse
#95. I do not repudiate any of my paintings but there isn't one of them that I would not redo differently, if I had it to redo. My destination is always the same but I work out a different route to get there.
Henri Matisse
#96. A work should contain its total meaning within itself and should impress it on the spectator before he even knows the subject.
Henri Matisse
#97. Starting to paint, I felt gloriously free, quiet, and alone.
Henri Matisse
#98. When you're out of willpower you call on stubbornness, that's the trick.
Henri Matisse
#99. In art, truth and reality begin when one no longer understands what one is doing or what one knows, and when there remains an energy that is all the stronger for being constrained, controlled and compressed.
Henri Matisse
#100. The essential thing is to spring forth, to express the bolt of lightning one senses upon contact with a thing. The function of the artist is not to translate an observation but to express the shock of the object on his nature; the shock, with the original reaction.
Henri Matisse
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