Top 100 Quotes About Matisse
#1. My mother was a Bloomsbury figure: a great friend of TS Eliot, Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell. My grandmother, Mary Hutchinson, gave her life to works of art, being an admirer of Matisse and Giaometti, whom I collected as a young man because of her.
Jacob Rothschild
#3. I can only paint in India. Europe belongs to Picasso, Matisse, Braque India belongs only to me.
Amrita Sher-Gil
#5. Don't feel you have to buy something to sit in or at. Buy something you are emotionally attached to and build your design around that. One Matisse cutout poster could provide you with your whole color scheme!
Alexandra Stoddard
#6. People say I am stuck in childhood, but it's not that. I remember seeing a Matisse retrospective, and you could see he started out one way, and then he tried something different, and then he seemed to spend his whole life trying to get back to the first thing.
Tim Burton
#7. You cannot deny your origins: I love Kirchner more than Matisse, although Matisse was a greater artist. That isn't to do with nationality. It's a stronger feeling.
Georg Baselitz
#8. Before he did all those lovely line drawings, Matisse would make really detailed charcoal drawings and tear them up. He wouldn't leave them about ... I understand what he was doing: discovering what's there ... to make the line meaningful, to find a linear solution ...
David Hockney
#9. Matisse was very clear about saying that you have to blow your own trumpet and explain yourself, which I think has been slightly forgotten.
Howard Hodgkin
#10. 'Matisse and Picasso' is a little like Plato after Socrates. Socrates only taught in words. He didn't write. And after that, you had Plato and Aristotle to write about what he had said. I write about them because they didn't write about them.
Francoise Gilot
#12. Art comes from art: I remember going to the Matisse show and seeing how Matisse had taken one of his own paintings, worked from it and transformed it, and that had led on to the next one and the next.
Anthony Caro
#14. In their pursuit of the same supreme end, Matisse and Picasso stand side by side, Matisse representing color and Picasso form.
Wassily Kandinsky
#15. Matisse was my God. I'm a French artist, that's for sure. I am color-oriented and what you might call a composer. I am not pouring my guts out; I keep them inside.
Francoise Gilot
#16. Matisse draws what I call the essence of the plants. He leaves a shape open. He'll do a leaf and not close it. Everybody used to say, oh, I got it all from Matisse, and I said, 'Not really.'
Ellsworth Kelly
#17. I think Picasso is more feminine than Matisse.
Gary Hume
#18. I'm completely aware of Matisse and what he said, that painters must begin by cutting out their tongues.
Don DeLillo
#19. You were a painting by Matisse, but you took sleeping pills.
Carole Maso
#20. I'd like to write the way Matisse paints.
A.S. Byatt
#21. I love the work of Matisse and Picasso, but I don't have enough millions to own one. And I don't really believe in owning art, anyway.
Ravi Shankar
#22. Anything that is not necessary to the painting damages it. Henri Matisse
Volkmar Essers
#24. It was Matisse who took the first step into the undiscovered land of the ugly.
Gelett Burgess
#25. Matisse can make you hate your life for its comparatively insipid joys.
Peter Schjeldahl
#26. Look, Matisse I ain't. You know how they have on the invitations, a reception for the artist will be held at ... And I say, Look, you gotta change this. I'm not an artist. I'm a photographer, a skilled craftsman.
Phil Stern
#27. It is comparatively easy to achieve a certain unity in a picture by allowing one colour to dominate, or by muting all the colours. Matisse did neither. He clashed his colours together like cymbals and the effect was like a lullaby.
John Berger
#28. I said, I don't want to paint things like Picasso's women and Matisse's odalisques lying on couches with pillows. I don't want to paint people. I want to paint something I have never seen before. I don't want to make what I'm looking at. I want the fragments.
Ellsworth Kelly
#29. When I tried to do something else, everyone behaved as if I was Gypsy Rose Lee trying to paint a Matisse.
Zoe Heller
#30. 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
#31. The skins matched all the tones of chocolate, coffee and wood. There were many white suits and dresses, and many of those flowered dresses which in the realm of printed dresses stand in the same relation as the old paintings of flowers and fruit done by maiden aunts to a Matisse, or a Braque.
Anais Nin
#32. I looked at Rembrandt and Superman, Matisse and Bugs Bunny, and began to make my own pictures.
Mordicai Gerstein
#33. I wanted to paint in a folk-artist-y way. My heroes were Van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse, and Rembrandt. I think Picasso is about as a modern as I got. But I incorporated things that they rejected as well as movements that happened later.
Joni Mitchell
#34. I'm sure I've been influenced by every fine writer I've ever read, from Dickens and Austen to Auden and Jane Hirshfield. And also, the short stories of Updike, Cheever, Munro, Alice Adams, and Doris Lessing. And the plays of Oscar Wilde. And paintings by Alice Neel and Matisse.
Amy Bloom
#35. In the dream world of Matisse and the gritty reality of American frontier, the diversity of women in our society offers the chance for greater exploration and even greater inspiration.
Vera Wang
#36. Simplicity can have a negative impact when it's the crude reduction of nuances beyond appreciation: a Matisse presented as a 16-color GIF.
Matt Mullenweg
#37. The problem with Matisse is that I can't ever figure out when he's done a good painting or a bad painting because I don't know how to analyse him. I just know that I like the way he put it on and I like his airs and forms.
Susan Rothenberg
#38. My little Renoirs. Matisse describes having seen Renoir make these tiny canvases. When he had finished working, he would use up the color left in his brushes on them.
Jean Cocteau
#39. Near the end of his life, Henri Matisse's preferred attire was evening wear,
by which I mean pajamas.
Holland Cotter
#40. The things that are acquired consciously permit us to express ourselves unconsciously with a certain richness.
Henri Matisse
#41. Seek the strongest color effect possible ... the content is of no importance.
Henri Matisse
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. Cezanne, you see, is a sort of God of painting.
Henri Matisse
#46. Modern art spreads joy around by its color, which calms us.
Henri Matisse
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. I've been forty years discovering that the queen of all colors is black.
Henri Matisse
#54. 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
#55. I do not literally paint that table, but the emotion it produces upon me.
Henri Matisse
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. Color, even more than drawing, is a means of liberation.
Henri Matisse
#59. Art should be something like a good armchair in which to rest from physical fatigue.
Henri Matisse
#60. 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
#62. Do remember that one line does nothing; it is only in relation to another that it creates a volume.
Henri Matisse
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. Seek for the boldest color possible, content is irrelevant.
Henri Matisse
#72. There are always flowers for those who want to see them.
Henri Matisse
#74. Color helps to express light, not the physical phenomenon, but the only light that really exists, that in the artist's brain.
Henri Matisse
#76. 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
#77. A certain color tones you up. It's the concentration of timbres.
Henri Matisse
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. Would not it be best to leave room to mystery?
Henri Matisse
#81. Don't wait for inspiration. It comes while one is working.
Henri Matisse
#82. 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
#83. To look at something as though we had never seen it before requires great courage.
Henri Matisse
#84. The main function of color should be to serve expression.
Henri Matisse
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. Hatred is a parasite that devours all. One doesn't build upon hatred, but upon love.
Henri Matisse
#89. 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
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. Drawing is like making an expressive gesture with the advantage of permanence.
Henri Matisse
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. I have simply wished to assert the reasoned and independent feeling of my own individuality within a total knowledge of tradition.
Henri Matisse
#99. All my efforts go into creating an art that can be understood by everyone.
Henri Matisse
#100. If my story were ever to be written truthfully from start to finish, it would amaze everyone.
Henri Matisse
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