Top 100 Quotes About Henri Matisse
#1. Anything that is not necessary to the painting damages it. Henri Matisse
Volkmar Essers
#3. You couldn't forget [Pablo] Picasso, [Henri] Matisse and [Joan] Miro either. And it had to be, you know, at least as good or better.
Frank Stella
#4. Near the end of his life, Henri Matisse's preferred attire was evening wear,
by which I mean pajamas.
Holland Cotter
#5. The things that are acquired consciously permit us to express ourselves unconsciously with a certain richness.
Henri Matisse
#6. Seek the strongest color effect possible ... the content is of no importance.
Henri Matisse
#7. Expression is not a matter of passion mirrored on the human face or revealed by a violent gesture. When I paint a picture, its every detail is expressive.
Henri Matisse
#8. The model for me is a touchstone, it is a door which I must break open in order to reach the garden in which I am alone and feel good, even the model exists only for what use I can make of it.
Henri Matisse
#9. 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
#10. Cezanne, you see, is a sort of God of painting.
Henri Matisse
#11. Modern art spreads joy around by its color, which calms us.
Henri Matisse
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. An artist who wants to transpose a composition onto a larger canvas must conceive it over again in order to preserve its expression; he must alter its character and not just fill in the squares into which he has divided his canvas.
Henri Matisse
#16. From the first shock of the contemplation of a face depends the principal sensation which guides me throughout the entire execution of a portrait.
Henri Matisse
#17. I've been forty years discovering that the queen of all colors is black.
Henri Matisse
#19. 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
#20. I do not literally paint that table, but the emotion it produces upon me.
Henri Matisse
#21. Love wants to rise, not to be held down by anything base ... He who loves flies, runs, and rejoices; he is free and nothing holds him back. Derive happiness from yourself, from a good day's work, from the clearing that it makes in the fog that surrounds us.
Henri Matisse
#22. You want to paint? First of all you must cut off your tongue because your decision takes away from you the right to express yourself with anything but your brush.
Henri Matisse
#23. Color, even more than drawing, is a means of liberation.
Henri Matisse
#24. Art should be something like a good armchair in which to rest from physical fatigue.
Henri Matisse
#25. 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
#27. Do remember that one line does nothing; it is only in relation to another that it creates a volume.
Henri Matisse
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. If it is practiced by a man of taste, the photograph will have the appearance of art (but) the photographer must ... intervene as little as possible, so as not to lose the objective charm which it naturally possesses.
Henri Matisse
#36. Seek for the boldest color possible, content is irrelevant.
Henri Matisse
#37. There are always flowers for those who want to see them.
Henri Matisse
#39. Color helps to express light, not the physical phenomenon, but the only light that really exists, that in the artist's brain.
Henri Matisse
#41. I have to create an object which resembles the tree. The sign for a tree, and not the sign that other artists may have found for the tree.
Henri Matisse
#42. A certain color tones you up. It's the concentration of timbres.
Henri Matisse
#43. 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
#44. The sign is determined at the moment I use it and for the object of which it must form a part. For this reason I cannot determine in advance signs which never change, and which would be like writing: that would paralyze the freedom of my invention.
Henri Matisse
#45. Would not it be best to leave room to mystery?
Henri Matisse
#46. Don't wait for inspiration. It comes while one is working.
Henri Matisse
#47. 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
#48. To look at something as though we had never seen it before requires great courage.
Henri Matisse
#49. The main function of color should be to serve expression.
Henri Matisse
#50. 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
#51. Truth and reality in art do not arise until you no longer understand what you are doing and are capable of but nevertheless sense a power that grows in proportion to your resistance.
Henri Matisse
#52. A young woman has young claws, well sharpened. If she has character, that is. And if she hasn't so much the worse for you.
Henri Matisse
#53. Hatred is a parasite that devours all. One doesn't build upon hatred, but upon love.
Henri Matisse
#54. 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
#57. It is only after years of preparation that the young artist should touch color - not color used descriptively, that is, but as a means of personal expression.
Henri Matisse
#58. 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
#59. What matters most to me? To work with my model until I have it enough in me to be able to improvise, to let my hand run free ...
Henri Matisse
#60. Drawing is like making an expressive gesture with the advantage of permanence.
Henri Matisse
#61. 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
#62. Composition, the aim of which is expression, alters itself according to the surface to be covered. If I take a sheet of paper of given dimensions, I will jot down a drawing which will have a necessary relation to its format.
Henri Matisse
#63. I have simply wished to assert the reasoned and independent feeling of my own individuality within a total knowledge of tradition.
Henri Matisse
#64. All my efforts go into creating an art that can be understood by everyone.
Henri Matisse
#65. If my story were ever to be written truthfully from start to finish, it would amaze everyone.
Henri Matisse
#66. Perhaps I might be satisfied, momentarily, with a work finished at one sitting, but I would soon get bored looking at it; therefore, I prefer to continue working on it so that later I may recognize it as a work of my mind.
Henri Matisse
#68. Don't try to be original. Be simple. Be good technically, and if there is something in you, it will come out.
Henri Matisse
#69. The energy within you is stronger than ever for being held back, compressed, and said No to ...
Henri Matisse
#70. An artist must never be a prisoner. Prisoner? An artist should never be a prisoner of himself, prisoner of style, prisoner of reputation, prisoner of success, etc
Henri Matisse
#71. Seeing is in itself a creative act which requires effort.
Henri Matisse
#73. I shan't get free of my emotion by copying the tree faithfully, or by drawing its leaves one by one in the common language, but only after identifying myself with it.
Henri Matisse
#74. 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
#75. He who loves, flies, runs, and rejoices; he is free and nothing holds him back.
Henri Matisse
#76. I am unable to make any distinction between the feeling I get from life and the way I translate that feeling into painting.
Henri Matisse
#77. 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
#78. I don't paint women, I paint pictures ... What I am after above all is expression. If in a portrait I put eyes, a nose, a mouth, there isn't much use; on the contrary it paralyses the imagination of the spectator, and obliges us to see the person in a certain way.
Henri Matisse
#79. There are flowers everywhere, for those who bother to look.
Henri Matisse
#80. The importance of an artist is to be measured by the quantity of new signs which he has introduced to the language of art.
Henri Matisse
#82. I am unable to distinguish between the feeling I have for life and my way of expressing it.
Henri Matisse
#83. The residuum of another's expression can never be related to one's own feeling.
Henri Matisse
#84. Much of the beauty that arises in art comes from the struggle an artist wages with his limited medium.
Henri Matisse
#85. Each work of art is a collection of signs invented during the picture's execution to suit the needs of their position. Taken out of the composition for which they were created, these signs have no further use.
Henri Matisse
#86. I don't paint things. I only paint the difference between things.
Henri Matisse
#87. When I put a green, it is not grass. When I put a blue, it is not the sky.
Henri Matisse
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. It is with color that you render light, though you must also feel this light, have it within yourself.
Henri Matisse
#92. After a half-century of hard work and reflection the wall is still there.
Henri Matisse
#93. The role of the artist, like that of the scholar, consists of seizing current truths often repeated to him, but which will take on new meaning for him and which he will make his own when he has grasped their deepest significance.
Henri Matisse
#94. The artist has to look at life as he did when he was a child. If he loses that faculty, he cannot express himself in an original, that is, a personal way.
Henri Matisse
#95. My pictures are made up of four or five colors that collide with one another ...
Henri Matisse
#97. I simply try to put down colors which render my sensation
Henri Matisse
#98. 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
#99. The living model, the naked body of a woman, is the privileged seat of feeling, but also of questioning ... The model must mark you, awaken in you an emotion which you seek in turn to express.
Henri Matisse
#100. Color exists in itself, possessing its own beauty.
Henri Matisse
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